The Issues metric counts the issues a user has opened in public repositories across their whole GitHub lifetime. Just opening them — comments, triage labels, and closing issues don't add to it, and neither does having your issue fixed.

What GitHub counts

Opening an issue in a public repository: +1.
Commenting on issues, closing them, or being assigned: not counted.
Issues in private repositories: absorbed into private contributions.

That narrowness makes the metric easy to read literally: it measures how often someone starts a written conversation about a problem.

Who racks up issues

High lifetime issue counts cluster around a few recognisable profiles:

Maintainers filing issues in their own projects — roadmap items, bug trackers, release checklists. Many maintainers are their own biggest issue reporters.
Serious users of other people's software — the people who take twenty minutes to write a reproducible bug report instead of shrugging. Every ecosystem quietly depends on them.
QA-minded engineers and technical writers, whose whole job produces issues rather than commits.

That's the key insight: a high issue count with a modest commit count is not a red flag. It often marks someone whose contribution is finding and describing problems precisely — which is frequently harder than fixing them.

What it doesn't measure

Quality of the reports, whether they were valid, or whether they were ever resolved. A hundred careful reproductions and a hundred "doesn't work, plz fix" weigh the same. It also misses all the issue work that isn't opening: triaging, deduplicating, and answering — labor that currently has no number anywhere on GitHub except partially in reviews.

How commit-history.com tracks it

Monthly issue contributions, accumulated from account creation to today into the cumulative chart, ranked by lifetime total on the leaderboard. The Issues curve often shows a distinctive shape: flat for years, then a sharp ramp when someone becomes a maintainer and the issue tracker becomes their desk.

See it in action

Look up a maintainer you know and switch the chart to Issues — then check their Total to see how the types stack together.