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Ask HN: Why is GitHub's “Landing page” so weird?

1 points by ilovetux ↗ HN
It's been bugging me for a while. When I go to github.com and I'm not signed in I get my username and password auto-filled into the "Sign up for Github" form with my username in the email text box, my password in the password box and the username field blank. This is strange enough as most websites I can think of present a login form with a "Sign up" link for new users, but I actually have to scroll up for the sign-in link.

I don't really care, but today I had a few minutes and figured I'd post a question on HN just because I'm genuinely curious why someone would design a login experience this way.

3 comments

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ilovetux
OP here, just realized I didn't post the details of my setup. I'm using a Razor Blade Stealth with Windows 10 and the latest stable version of Firefox.
feooho
From my personal experience, I rarely travel to github.com directly. I either go to a link of some repo I'm interested in, or I have github.com/login bookmarked so it goes to the login page. Normally I am still logged in too, so github.com goes to my dashboard(?) page anyway.

I think you have to ask, if someone is going to github.com, what are the chances they don't have an account and so signup is more applicable. Rather than users who probably have somewhere specific to go or are logged in already and will bypass that page.

Just my two cents.

I do understand where you're coming from and vaguely remember thinking the same when I first started using github.

ilovetux
Yeah, I suppose you're right. I rarely go to github.com directly as well, but today I have already read all of HN first three pages and my next move (if I have time) is to go to github.com and "explore" as I like that they recommend repositories based on what I have "starred".