Does anybody know how to find a list of the users with longest Github streaks ever?
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6I read that answer to bless questions about GitHub, provided they meet all the other criteria - in other words, being about GitHub doesn't make every question suitable (just like not every question about C++ is suitable). IMHO this question is off topic whether it refers to GitHub or something else. – Nov 20 '13 at 14:59
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3This question appears to be off-topic because it is about GitHub users, not about programming – Keith Thompson Nov 27 '13 at 00:05
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1@KeithThompson this question can also be interpreted as: on GitHub, how to progammatically get a list of users with the longest strikes, which my answer answers. With that interpretation, it might be suitable, since it boils down to a GitHub API question. – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Apr 01 '15 at 20:50
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I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this is nothing more than trivia and not relevant to programming at large. – Makoto Aug 27 '15 at 15:34
3 Answers
Streak is easy to game, so results will not be relevant
As of 2015-03-20, it might be me with 32k days (100 years) https://github.com/cirosantilli , but it was giving 502 most of the time so I opened an issue for that. I later pushed a 1000 year streak, but it gives 502 all the time.
Update 2015-10-21: GitHub contacted me and explained that this was consuming too much resources on their servers. My profile page is back for the first time since 7 months :-) But my public contributions simply don't show, while normal users have an empty "Public contributions" and "Contribution activity" sections. This is step 1 of fixing things twice.
Generated with https://gist.github.com/cirosantilli/4d24fc646ab9aec8def7 by making one commit per day, making this metric very easy to game to infinity. The bounding factor I've found so far was the repository generation time. Repository size is small (15M). Maybe someone can optimize the commit generation speed? Edit 2016-05: I have since generated 1 million commits in a few minutes (but it does not scale to 10M very well): https://github.com/cirosantilli/test-many-commits-1m
Update 2015-04-01: it seems that GitHub patched it to limit new streaks arbitrarily to 1000 days, even though my home still gives 502. Tested with my puppet: https://github.com/cirosantilli-puppet , https://github.com/cirosantilli-puppet/test-streak (now deleted because of their silly one account per person policy, I have since learned to use webarchive and tor).
Update 2016-05-19: streaks were deprecated: https://github.com/blog/2173-more-contributions-on-your-profile but my contribution graph is not back up yet.
Other stroke gaming methods
- https://github.com/4148/greenhat Seems to generate a more camouflaged streak that looks more authentic
- https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar allows you to pick a language to generate contributions for
Possible ways to do if if you're still interested
Holman said that he does not think there is a simple way to get it, so probably there isn't.
http://longeststreak.net/ is (was, down now?) maintaining a programmaticaly generated list. Source code: https://github.com/oblakeerickson/longest_streak . I haven't looked into their techniques.
As of Jan 2015, the longest streak on longestreak is: 5168 by mahipal, but that is clearly a gamed streak on a single empty repo. Since this is about 14 years, longer than GitHub exists, it indicates that the method used by longstreak is the same as GitHub, as it considers only repository data instead of push date, which is easy to game like I did. I wonder why mahipal stopped at such a small number in his gamed streak, so I asked him at https://github.com/cirosantilli/chat/issues/1 . No reply so far.
Upon quick inspection, the top 10 streaks of longstreak seem to be gamed, or made of diligent trivial contributions.
Possible starting points that export all GitHub public data:
- https://www.githubarchive.org/ exports hourly to Google BigQuery
- http://ghtorrent.org/ exports quarterly as a torrent
Misc
- https://github.com/wojciechpolak/vcstreak calculates a stream for a given local repository
- https://github.com/motdotla/github-streaker emails you to remind to continue your streak
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8848024 asks why streak is limited to 1096. Contacted OP at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/chat/issues/17 My theory is that it is 1000 + non-gamed commits.
- https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti draws pixel art on your "Public contributions" instead
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/isometric-contributions/mjoedlfflcchnleknnceiplgaeoegien Chrome extension that shows streak. Not sure if for last year only or all time.
- https://hackernoon.com/believe-it-or-not-github-edition-90e61a1bdf4b features my saga

- 347,512
- 102
- 1,199
- 985
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How does this work? Does Github counts "local commits" even when the server has not verified the time of submission? – Pacerier Apr 11 '15 at 15:25
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1@Pacerier At least when I pushed yes: GitHub used only the Git repo data, not the push time the server received the push. Which is silly :-) – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Apr 11 '15 at 15:31
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@Pacerier oh, and I admire your necromancer vibe, I'l like that too: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/176808/users-with-most-necromancer-badges – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Apr 11 '15 at 15:33
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1@Circo, Nice, I'll add that link in. Btw if you have a space in your name, when people `@` you the taboo 六四事件 法轮功 wouldn't be included. – Pacerier Apr 11 '15 at 18:10
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1GitHub used to use server push time, but it forced all contributions to be spaced by what date they had been contributed on in Pacific time. This reduces the flexibility of contribution dates for developers in other time zones, so they changed it to come from commit times so it could reflect *local* time zones. – Stuart P. Bentley Aug 19 '15 at 22:50
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@StuartP.Bentley nice rationale! Is there an official source? – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Aug 20 '15 at 07:23
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That the commits used to be measured by server time was just my own observation, but the change where they introduced time zone awareness has its own blog post: https://github.com/blog/1793-timezone-aware-contribution-graphs – Stuart P. Bentley Aug 20 '15 at 07:40
This gist provides a list of the 256 most active users. At the bottom of the list there is a list of Contribution Streak
users that will answer this question more directly. I have not seen a report of all time streak records.

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1I was thinking more in terms of consecutive day, in which at least one contribution was submitted, but I think for now this is the best information I can get. Thanks. – Alexander Popov Nov 20 '13 at 15:47
I saw that Gist
listed above this and poked through it (unfortunately, I'm unfamiliar with JS), but I did find the below link:
https://api.github.com/legacy/user/search/followers:1?sort=public_repo_count&order=asc&start_page=#1
Which results in a JSON
document where you can apply filters (for instance, you can change how it's sorted). What I didn't find in the document is the streak, but I'm sure if you poke around, you could probably find it. The Gist
returns a few of the users; I'm curious what the top 50 or so would be.

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