Someone uses your Git history to inflate their GitHub commit/contributor count

[pawamoy]

Hey, sorry, kinda off-topic, just wanted to give you a heads-up. There’s this repository GitHub - ishandutta2007/Top-AI-repos at a2835d7e88fc047914bfbedf6d27ed1400fe0509 · GitHub which clearly uses n8n’s history with interleaved, unrelated commits from the owner. Looks to me like they try to inflate their contributor count. I’m not sure contributors like to be used like that.

They initially sent me an invite out of the blue (and I’m not the only one), which I consider spam, and couldn’t help but dig a little. Anyway, just wanted to let you know, feel free to ignore

[achamm]

@Anshul_Namdev

[Jon]

@pawamoy I guess the good news is their contributions don’t show on our repo so I don’t think there is really anything to worry about here.

If anyone looks they will see a branch that contains n8n and their own commits, I don’t think anyone would take it seriously.

It is interesting to see though, I wonder what they think they will get from it

[achamm]

Looks like they didn’t mean to actually include it 300MB git history — large files from n8n repo and package-lock bloat · Issue #26 · ishandutta2007/Top-AI-repos · GitHub

[pawamoy]

I wish, but I really don’t buy into that. The author proudly auto-builds a list of all contributors’ profile pictures. The commit count is 20K+, while git log | grep -ic authoremail (replace with actual email) outputs 496. n8n wasn’t vendored in a n8n/ directory as suggested by the issue/commit, it was sitting in the root of the repository. Anyway ^^ Just looks like reputation farming to me.

[achamm]

perhaps, looks like it hasnt been touched much since may/april