Cloners skyrocketed

[Ry8icks]

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I did some light refreshments on a repo that I made about 4 years ago. The number of cloners have been modest, I would say a total of about 30, up until today, when the number of cloners skyrocketed. I got more cloners in one day, than I’ve had on the past 4 years. Why is that? A bunch of people out there must have been notified, or what?

[yiiingye]

That kind of sudden spike in repository cloning can happen for a few reasons, even if you didn't directly share the repo yourself:

1. GitHub Algorithm / Trending: Sometimes, GitHub highlights certain repositories in the "Trending" section or in user feeds if activity suddenly increases — like recent commits or stars.

2. Search Engine Indexing: If you updated the README or made changes recently, search engines (like Google or Bing) may have re-indexed the repo, making it more visible in search results.

3. Mentioned Elsewhere: Your repo might have been shared on a popular developer site like Hacker News, Reddit, Stack Overflow, or in a newsletter without you knowing.

4. Dependabot or GitHub Actions Updates: Updating dependencies or GitHub Actions files can also trigger GitHub bots or other automated systems that monitor activity and surface the repo.

5. Someone Forked It: If someone with a large audience forked or starred your project, their followers might have seen it.

If you want to investigate further:

• Check referrer URLs in your repository's traffic insights (Insights → Traffic).
• Look for spikes in stars, forks, or issues opened around the same time.

This kind of boost can be a good thing — your work might be helping more people than you realized!

[Ry8icks]

That was a lot of possible reasons! Thank you. However I’ve looked through them all and have not been able to pinpoint any of them. In case anyone wants to make some more digging or are just interested in wind turbine simulations here’s a link to the repo: https://github.com/Ry8ics/Faster

[Ry8icks]

I think I’ve found the reason. The software that I’ve developed was for manipulation and control of another software. This latter software is a huge system with a lot of users and with its own discussion forum. I just found that of all the topics and issues that are being discussed at this forum my software is ranked in 7th place under the banner «last visit». That is, my software is suddenly way up there on the list and gets (as it seems) a lot of attention. It looks like reason number 3 is the probable cause. Thank you and case closed.

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