Porchlamp

Find the projects that leave the light on.

A porch lamp left on tells a visitor they are expected. Porchlamp ranks open-source projects the same way: by what happens to a stranger's pull request, not by how many stars the project has.

Open the ranking: https://porchlamp.org/

Read the report, with charts and the method: https://porchlamp.org/black-holes/

Stars don't review pull requests

Measured on the 2026-11-10 snapshot of 11,000 projects:

• More than 1 in 8 active projects are black holes. Of the 4,396 licensed, maintained software projects with at least ten counted outside pull requests in six months, 562 (12.8%) left most of them with no human reply, review, merge or close within two weeks or since. We could not judge 1 busy project yet: we hold only its newest 500 pull requests, and they do not reach back to 27 April.
• More stars, more silence. The black-hole share rises with popularity: 10% of projects with 1k–10k stars, 16% at 10k–50k, and 16% at 50k or more.
• Stars barely predict the ranking. Across the 4,044 ranked projects the rank correlation between stars and the Porchlamp score is 0.06, and 10 of the 100 most-starred projects make the top 100.

Where the numbers come from

We followed 1,726,942 pull requests from 268,211 outside contributors to 11,000 projects over six months: who got an answer, how fast, how many reached a decision, whether first-time contributors came back, and how much other software depends on each project. Black holes, and projects that are archived, unmaintained, unlicensed or not software, are listed but never ranked. The rest are scored on five pillars and re-weighted for five kinds of contributor. Every number traces back to a recorded GitHub response and its content hash.

This repository

This repository is the published site and nothing else: a static snapshot served by GitHub Pages. Every ranking, filter and project page is answered from precomputed JSON under data/2026-11-10/ by api.js (project records sharded into 256 hash-bucketed files under data/2026-11-10/repos/), so the site needs no server.

• Snapshot ID: 2026-11-10 (measured as of 2026-10-24T18:10:00+00:00, benchmark 2.0.0-rc1)
• Universe Counts: 4,044 rated (ranked) · 5,114 gated (Stage 0) · 1,842 unrated (<60% coverage) · 11,000 total
• Persona Visible Counts: balanced: 4,044 · first_timer: 1,904 · career_capital: 872 · senior_systems: 986 · ai_assisted: 4,002
• Verification Hashes: constants_hash: 44b11850f0a2… · manifest_root: 3a071aa3e96a… · canonical_dump_hash: 44959749335b…

Help improve it

Porchlamp is open source, and every issue and pull request gets a reply from a person within 14 days.

• A record looks wrong? Each project page ends with a link that opens a report with the project filled in.
• Want to change the code, the method or the site? The engine builds all of it: https://github.com/pctablet505/porchlamp-engine . Start with its guide for contributors: https://github.com/pctablet505/porchlamp-engine/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md . This repository is rebuilt at every publish, so a change made here would be overwritten.

License and citation

The data under data/ and the text of this site are licensed under CC BY 4.0: reuse them freely, with credit to "Porchlamp rankings" and a link to https://porchlamp.org/. To cite the dataset, use GitHub's "Cite this repository" button, which reads CITATION.cff. To cite a finding, link the report frozen for this snapshot: https://porchlamp.org/black-holes/2026-11-10/ . The code in this repository is not covered by this license. The engine that collects the data is open source under the Apache License 2.0: https://github.com/pctablet505/porchlamp-engine .