Search Filters and Ranking

Search, filters, and ranking

Filters

Filter	Choices
Contributor label	help wanted, good first issue, up-for-grabs, first-timers-only, hacktoberfest, bug, documentation
Sort	Recently updated, Trending, Most comments, Newest
Linked pull request	Any, present, absent
Hacktoberfest	All issues, Hacktoberfest ready
Experience	Any, first contribution, beginner, intermediate
Contribution type	Any, documentation, tests, bug fix, feature
Scope	Any, small scope
Maintainer responsiveness	Any, responsive, variable, slow, unknown
Contribution readiness	Any, ready to start

Experience, contribution type, and small-scope classifications require explicit labels or structured issue-template fields. Weakly signaled issues remain unclassified instead of receiving a guessed effort estimate.

Scores and status

The contributor-quality score combines issue suitability with a small repository-health boost. Repository health considers recent pushes, issue and pull-request activity, stars, forks, and whether the issue tracker is enabled.

Maintainer responsiveness is separate. A bounded, cached sample of recent issues and external pull requests looks for maintainer first responses, unanswered contributor-friendly issues, closures, and merge ratio. Fewer than four useful samples, unavailable authentication, or partial failures produce Unknown.

Contribution readiness combines health, responsiveness, assignment and discussion state, and community files such as README, contributing guide, license, code of conduct, and issue/PR templates. It distinguishes ready, ask first, claimed, poorly documented, inactive, and unknown opportunities.

Trending search considers issues updated in the previous 30 days and combines recency, discussion volume, stars, and repository health. The normal quality score remains visible.

Partial enrichment

GitHub metadata, discussion analysis, linked-PR detection, responsiveness, and community profiles are optional enrichment. Their failure does not discard usable results. The interface reports partial availability and omits unavailable signals from explanations.

Use the GitHub issue as the source of truth before committing work.