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It looks like GitHub removed the old rankings completely. For example, I can no longer see C projects ranked by star count. https://github.com/languages/C/most_watched redirects to https://github.com/trending :(

To be honest, I mostly used those pages to satisfy my own vanity. My C project (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher) just beat Arduino (https://github.com/arduino/Arduino) and was gunning for mruby (https://github.com/mruby/mruby).

It seems like Github has been removing useful features with every update. I remember when I could actually see the traffic to my project pages, for example, but they removed that when they launched the new graphs.
Github owns gaug.es and it would make a lot of sense if they integrated it into github.com. One of the removed metrics is also clone counts.
Thx for making the silver searcher. When I'm dealing with large scale git repos it blows ack/grep, etc away :)
This has potential of becoming alternate to Hacker News with NSA and funding related stories filtered out.
That was my first thought. Github's needed this feature for a while and github repos are my favorite thing to find on the frontpage of HN anyway.
If they add commenting, it will be Hacker News.
Incidentally, HN is a GitHub blog RSS parser ;)
Coincidentally, we just launched an improved version of our GitHub analytics app with hourly page view charts. We also show rankings by country and language for all repos (not just the top 25 ones).

You might want to check it out if you're interested in finding out why your project is trending: https://bitdeli.com/

Our language library can't always determine the language for the repository, but that won't keep the repository from trending.

Right, this is why you should do the obvious, common-sense, reasonable thing and let repository owners explicitly declare the language for their repo. Fiddling with byzantine mechanism to try and exclude library files, and other black magic, only to still be left merely hoping that they get it right, sucks.

What does this even mean, anyway? Trending by what metric? Commits? Stars? Watches? Clicks? All of the above? Something else? ???
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Trending is popularity over time. Popularity is probably an aggregate of what you just mentioned.
Popularity is probably an aggregate of what you just mentioned

IMO, it would be more useful if Github told us what it means with some specificity. Maybe not every detail, if they want to avoid having people try to game the system... but a synthetic metric that no-one understands the basis of, strikes me as somewhat useless.

Must have been updated since as they posted at the bottom of the post,

"What makes repositories or developers trend? We look at a variety of data points including stars, forks, commits, follows, and pageviews, weighting them appropriately. It's not just about total numbers, but also how recently the events happened."

Aaah, I see. Not sure if the page was updated, or if I overlooked that bit. But at any rate, it's good to know. I mean, I assumed it was something like that, but it's nice to get some clarity.
Finally, GitHub is as capable as PornHub when finding trending content.

Now we just have to wait for PornHub to introduce forking movies...

This is pretty cool! I have a dream about making small-medium contributing to tons and tons of random projects, just to learn and get to work with interesting people. The old search feature made it kind of hard to find cool repo's to work on that weren't seemingly saturated with contributors, I thought maybe I was using the "explore" feature wrong or else that you were supposed to find links on places like HN.

I'm hoping this one is better suited for such a purpose, but hoping even more that I find the motivation to follow through on the dream. No better time to start than tonight I suppose ;)

Is default list of languages in the sidebar the top 7 trending languages? Surprised to see Clojure and VimL.