GitHub's UI Bugs Are Miscounting Pull Requests and Hiding Pages
GitHub Is Having Trouble Counting Things
A developer with 11 years on GitHub reports two severe UI bugs: a repository's PR tab overcounts pull requests, sometimes showing two when only one exists, and the organization pagination block omits page two entirely. The correct count is visible on the same page, and Chrome's pop-up windows block manual URL edits, forcing a JavaScript workaround. The author asks if others have insight into what's happening at GitHub.
For some reason, Chrome doesn’t let you modify the address in the bar for these pop-up windows. Luckily, you can force navigate using JavaScript.
- nxc18
GitHub, including Enterprise (so not just Azure’s fault), has become unreliable, low quality software.
I say unreliable because I cannot rely on it to accurately do what it claims to do. I cannot trust any number. I cannot trust that actions I invoke will actually happen. I cannot trust that taking action will not have mysterious side effects (e.g. re-opening an issue my boss’s boss closed in 2017 without explanation). I think I trust the underlying git infra but at this point I’m not sure why I do.
I say low quality because it is extremely slow at random moments, gets into broken inconsistent UI states, has baffling UX choices that make it harder to navigate than it should be (particularly with new UIs), and overall just doesn’t have the fit and finish we should expect from software in 1996 - or 2026, or literally any time in between.
- zX41ZdbW
Some of the oldest PRs could no longer be found.
For example, when I decided to continue my eight-year-old PR https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/104948, I couldn't see it - neither in search nor while navigating through pages.
Direct links still work.
- datadrivenangel
Dirty reads is a classic symptom of scaling poorly. Eventually consistent database writes are fine, but it's a bad look if a user takes an action and then doesn't see the results of their action.
- huurtehoog
The fact that there's so much indirection between what happens in the registers and memory in the machine, the underlying reality being modeled by software, and the information displayed semantically to the users, is a travesty.
Software could be so much simpler and more reliable. There's so much bloat that is necessary to solve problems created by bloat. I hope we find our way out of this mess sooner rather than later. I'd hate for entire generations to suffer the current state of software whereas the theoretical understanding necessary to make things better was produced very early in the history of programmable computers.
- Droobfest
I was having the problem yesterday that the GitHub API sometimes simply doesn't list an in progress workflow run in the output when I specifically filter for it:
"api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs?status=in_progress" -> outputs 3 workflow runs
5 seconds later -> outputs 2 workflow runs
5 seconds later -> outputs same 3 workflow runs again
Apparently they make no guarantees of any type of consistency or continuity in output, which has the side effect of also making it completely useless.