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coffeeboy

5 karma · joined May 12, 2025

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coffeeboy··on Show HN: CLI that spots fake GitHub stars, risky dependencies and licence traps
Very nice! I'm personally looking into bot account detection for my own service and have come up with very similar heuristics (albeit simpler ones since I'm doing this at scale) so I will provide some additional ones that I have discovered:

1. Fork to stars ratio. I've noticed that several of the "bot" repos have the same number of forks as stars (or rather, most ratios are above 0.5). Typically a project doesn't have nearly as many forks as stars.

2. Fake repo owners clone real projects and push them directly to their account (not fork) and impersonate the real project to try and make their account look real.

Example bot account with both strategies employed: https://github.com/algariis