GitHub adds star-history endpoint and limits stargazer lists

Maintainers can now get star trends in one request, while detailed user lists are limited to repo admins and collaborators.

GitHub has added a new star-history endpoint that returns daily counts for up to 30 weeks in one request, while restricting the older stargazer and watcher lists to repository admins and collaborators. The change matters because maintainers and tool builders wanted the trend line, not user identities, and the old paginated API was expensive to serve on popular projects. GitHub says the previous design could force the database to count huge stargazer sets on every page, and on react/react building the full curve took about 2,511 requests for roughly 251,000 stars. In the week before access was restricted, nearly 37,000 slow count queries were logged, averaging almost 3 seconds each, and more than 1,000 were killed by safeguards. GitHub worked with the Star History maintainer and the broader community to design the new aggregate endpoint.