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I forked one of GitHub's own abandoned projects and noticed that it was archived when I received a flurry of notifications as all of it's issues were being clos

I forked one of GitHub's own abandoned projects and noticed that it was archived when I received a flurry of notifications as all of it's issues were being closed automatically. It is actually a little harder to find the links to my fork now, because they were comments on the unresolved issues that were created when I migrated them to my fork. It might be useful to promote the "Network" graph a little more prominently once a project is archived.

nerdponx 9y ago
It seems like the network actually got harder to access in recent UI updates. It's a really useful feature when looking at repos of projects that haven't been updated in a few years.
- jakub_g 9y ago
  FYI you can use http://forked.yannick.io http://forked.yannick.io to find the most starred / most forked fork. It would be really great if GitHub made something like that a built-in. On my side, I've been a Cordova developer for a while and I experienced many dead repos (I think most Cordova devs go native at one point). Fork reconciliation is an interesting issue but not sure how to implement it to prevent abuse. I once got an email from a guy who created a fork, sent an email to all the owners of the other forks who were ahead, to come up with a community fork, I think that's the best we can have for now. The main problem is how to signalize to other devs that you're interested in maintaining the fork and accepting PRs. One way could be to just comment on open issues/PRs on the dead repo to say "come to my fork", but when the repo is archived, seems it won't be possible anymore. So it would be actually harder now to create a community fork.
mikemcquaid 9y ago
Note that archived repository issues aren’t closed automatically. I did so manually but en masse before archiving some of GitHub’s deprecated projects this week so this may have been what you saw.

nerdponx 9y ago

It seems like the network actually got harder to access in recent UI updates. It's a really useful feature when looking at repos of projects that haven't been updated in a few years.

jakub_g 9y ago
FYI you can use http://forked.yannick.io http://forked.yannick.io to find the most starred / most forked fork. It would be really great if GitHub made something like that a built-in. On my side, I've been a Cordova developer for a while and I experienced many dead repos (I think most Cordova devs go native at one point). Fork reconciliation is an interesting issue but not sure how to implement it to prevent abuse. I once got an email from a guy who created a fork, sent an email to all the owners of the other forks who were ahead, to come up with a community fork, I think that's the best we can have for now. The main problem is how to signalize to other devs that you're interested in maintaining the fork and accepting PRs. One way could be to just comment on open issues/PRs on the dead repo to say "come to my fork", but when the repo is archived, seems it won't be possible anymore. So it would be actually harder now to create a community fork.

mikemcquaid 9y ago

Note that archived repository issues aren’t closed automatically. I did so manually but en masse before archiving some of GitHub’s deprecated projects this week so this may have been what you saw.