I've been seeing a pretty big surge of GitHub scrapers on more seedy sites like BHW the past few months (mostly for scrapers looking for auth keys, passwords, etc). I wonder if this change has anything to do with making "download and go" scrapers 1) harder to develop (having to provide configurability and manage sessions), and 2) harder to set up for the end-user (see: your average script kiddies).

Not a huge deterrent (if it's even related), but maybe requiring users to be logged in would provide GitHub a better avenue to limit/ban users clearly using these scripts.

I found a recent thread about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12439499

It seems that Github Code Search no longer functions as it used to function for logged out users, which is quite interesting so to say.