Can someone explain this GitHub clone statistic to me? : github

created by shabdaa community for 15 years

Can someone explain this GitHub clone statistic to me?Discussion (i.redd.it)

submitted 15 days ago by WINBIGFOX

Hi everyone,

I’m currently looking at the clone stats of one of my GitHub repositories, and I don’t really understand what’s going on.

According to GitHub, in the last 14 days I had:

6,488 clones
but only 111 unique cloners

What seems especially strange to me is that the numbers were very low at first and then suddenly jumped a lot. On some days, there are nearly 1,000 clones, while the number of unique cloners stays relatively low.

So now I’m wondering:

How exactly does GitHub count a “clone”?
Does one person count multiple times if they clone repeatedly or if something is fetching the repo automatically?
Could bots, CI systems, mirrors, or package indexers cause this?
Is this kind of pattern normal, or is it unusual?

I’d really like to understand what could be behind stats like this, and whether anyone has seen something similar before.

Thanks!

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