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[REST] avatar_url examples are misleading

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#3,259 11 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
github, json, openapi
Domain
api, documentation

Research direction

Start with the linked REST commits/statuses article and search this repository for its source and the example response containing avatar_url. Check the rendered examples and the related status fields; done means the examples no longer use misleading 404 avatar URLs and clearly represent the requested status information.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

content feature rest-schema
Code of Conduct
What article on docs.github.com is affected?

https://docs.github.com/en/rest/commits/statuses?apiVersion=2022-11-28

What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?

The example responses have things like:

  {
    "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/statuses/6dcb09b5b57875f334f61aebed695e2e4193db5e",
    "avatar_url": "https://github.com/images/error/hubot_happy.gif",
    "id": 1,
    "node_id": "MDY6U3RhdHVzMQ==",
    "state": "success",
    "description": "Build has completed successfully",
    "target_url": "https://ci.example.com/1000/output",
    "context": "continuous-integration/jenkins",
    "created_at": "2012-07-20T01:19:13Z",
    "updated_at": "2012-07-20T01:19:13Z",
    "creator": {
      "login": "octocat",
      "id": 1,
      "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjE=",
      "avatar_url": "https://github.com/images/error/octocat_happy.gif",

Note that both avatar_urls are 404:

This doesn't seem to match the real world, and since I'm looking for the word error, it's really confusing/misleading.

Checking https://api.github.com/users/octocat, it appears it's more likely that it should be something like:

{
  "login": "octocat",
  "id": 583231,
  "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjU4MzIzMQ==",
  "avatar_url": "https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/583231?v=4",

I can't tell if that's the avatar_url I should see in both places or if they're very different things.

Additional information

I'm trying to get information on error, failure, pending, or success, so I'm looking for those in the output of responses...

Note that the use of a lot of "id": 1, for things that might be different is very counter-productive.

It'd be really nice if the sample output covered each of the status states instead of just one.

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