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As an interesting side effect, they will have pretty exact stats on how many active users they have; might help them sunset old accounts or move them to the slowest servers.

(Because of the offline nature of most git actions and different habits on pushing/pulling, it's probably hard to otherwise estimate how much a user cares about their github.)



Why is this more effective than say "number of push / pulls in the last month"?


Some people try to pool local commits into larger, less frequent pushes and pulls so the number of push/pulls is perhaps less relevant than their cumulative size. But pushes/pulls will never correspond well with user involvement because people use github for all kinds of scenarios. For instance, I might be developing branches that I don't want to push or pull to github yet--maybe I don't even intend to ever make them public. However, I may still want people to clone from my github repo and report issues to me.

The amount of time between someone getting an email from github and re-activating their account is probably the best metric github will ever have on users' attachment to their accounts.


From the way their servers are laid out in the presentation I saw they wouldn't want to move them all to a slow server, but would want them evenly distributed to help decrease load on the servers.


We have stats on this from other sources, actually. But it did provide some interesting graphs this morning :)




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