> So, would this inactive/status flag provide a significant benefit over editing the name/description/readme? You can always cram more data into another field,

> So, would this inactive/status flag provide a significant benefit over editing the name/description/readme? You can always cram more data into another field, but now you've lost easy access to valuable metadata--this would be a hack, rather than a solution. Proposing for users to use a hack rather than a clean, semantically different, UI element is not good on your part as a designer. A "Status" field benefits users as repository pages can have a prominent notification of the current status. You can also use it as a flag for searches to avoid having to wade through various abandoned projects before finding one that is being maintained. And for the GitHub developers, it will provide a valuable statistic. Now they can track the progress and usage of repositories without potentially using assumptions like "Hmm, this repo has not be committed to for X days--could be abandoned?" or having to parse through the description/readme for keywords like "abandoned" or "no longer maintained", etc. So yes, I would say that this simple metadata field would significantly benefit the users and developers.