polling every 30 seconds regardless of response headers is kinda irresponsible

[fiendish]

Polling all repos every 30 seconds rapidly leads to rate limit exhaustion with many repos, which is avoidable. Github tells exactly how many requests you have left and when they will reset in their response headers.

imo, by default this should only request updates when the user interacts with the menu icon instead of polling.

[lagartoflojo]

should only request updates when the user interacts with the menu icon

That's not a bad idea. I will try it out. I think what's important is that the user doesn't see outdated information, so it depends on how fast the update goes.

[fiendish]

I know you have a few enhancement todo's in the issues list for things like live notifications, which is obviously incompatible with never polling. One extremely minor but helpful change would be to just tweak the prefs string that currently says "To access your private repos, log in to GitHub." I think most people will not be aware of how low Github's un-auth'ed rate limits are. I even work with their API all the time and I forgot myself.

Another option along the same lines could be a warning message in the add/remove pane if the user is not auth'ed that 2 or more connected repos is guaranteed to hit the rate limit.