watchers count wrong?

[milo]

watchers count wrong?

[milo]

Hi Peter. The response corresponds to official repo documentation. It looks like some historical thing to me and GitHub keeps backward compatibility.

[bartclaeys]

I just encountered the same issue, the API returns a different value for watchers than what's displayed on the website. @milo I don't understand your remark regarding that. Are you saying that what watchers returns is historical data and no longer being updated? If so, how can we retrieve an accurate number for watchers?

[milo]

Hi @bartclaeys I think that years before, GitHub used only one "watching" button, it was watchers value in the API. But one day, they split it into Watch and Star. The watchers became to stargazers and new subscribers arose.

[bartclaeys]

API v3 REST does not return subscribers unfortunately.

[bartclaeys]

Also, it seems with graphql they don't support this yet:

https://platform.github.community/t/get-contribution-statistics/971/7

[milo]

@bartclaeys Did you read the doc? There is a subscribers_count.

[vtempest]

This is so confusing and affects all repos

https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=vscode
stargazers_count: 70274,
forks_count: 9362,
forks: 9362
watchers_count: 70274, <--(LISTED)
watchers: 70274,

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode
Stars 70,274
Forks 9,362
Watchers 2,667 <--- (REAL)

[ewels]

@bartclaeys Did you read the doc? There is a subscribers_count.

There is indeed, however I've never seen it in my returned from the API, along with is_template and a few other fields. You can see this at the link mentioned above too: https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=vscode

Old thread sorry, but I came here from google and figured others may do the same.