How a card is read.

X shows the public about a hundred posts per handle: the account’s most-liked posts across its whole life, plus the most recent one. That is the sample, and it is not last month. A card never says it is.

Each exposed post is filed under the year it was written. The year with the most top posts is the X peak. Only completed years are counted: this year is shown but never stamped, because likes take time to arrive and a young post always loses to an old one.

Because the sample is drawn by likes, it leans toward whenever the account was biggest. A peak year is a portrait of when X paid the most attention, not a judgement of when the work was best. We call them most-rewarded posts for that reason.

Two gates stand between a read and a stamp. Thin: fewer than 90 ranked posts across completed years. Faint: fewer than 1,000 likes in the whole sample. Either way the card is shown as an incomplete read, with the numbers X returned and no peak, no class, no box, and no place in Trending or on the 2×2. A fuller read through the paid source lifts the gate.

Rookies are exempt. An account whose exposed posts are all from the current year has nothing to rank yet and says so; it is not a failed read.

Ships is days with GitHub activity in the last 365, public and private alike, as a share of the year. Private days count; private commits stay unseen. When part of the year’s activity is private the card says what share, so a low public repo list next to a high Ships number is explained, not hidden.

A day counts once however much happened on it, so a commit-a-day script and a real working day look the same in the number. Repos touched and stars sit next to it for that reason. Ships at 25% of days or more is the line between the two right-hand boxes and the two left-hand boxes on the wall.

“GitHub not linked” is blank, never zero. A handle with no GitHub login tied to it gets the X half only and no box. Owners tie a login by signing in; a login GitHub itself lists under the same handle is taken as the owner’s word.

Talk is likes on the ten best posts of the last twelve months. It is held against the median of the account’s own follower band, under 10K, 10K–100K, or 100K+, never against the whole wall. Above the band’s median is loud; under it is quiet. A band with fewer than three stamped accounts borrows the wall’s median so one account is never its own yardstick.

The 2×2 filters by band so a 2K-follower builder is read beside other 2K-follower builders.

Attention lag is the X peak year minus the GitHub peak year. +2 yrs means GitHub saw the most work two years before X paid the most attention. −1 yr means the talk came first. Same year means the two records agree. It needs a completed year on both sides; without one the card shows a dash.

The lag compares the shape of two records rather than their size, which makes it steadier than either peak on its own: an account that grew fast on X still has a GitHub year to hold that peak against.

There is no ranking and no grade. The wall sorts any way the reader likes and nobody is number one. The four boxes are corners, not tiers.

Likes are attention, not quality. Contribution days are presence, not output. A designer, a closed-source founder, or a maintainer who works in an organisation’s private repos can read low on GitHub and be building all day; the box says off the record, which claims nothing about where the work is.

Nothing you can buy changes a number. The only paid things are claims and listings: a link and one line under your own card, and a guaranteed full read with a place on the wall. There is no pay-to-rank.