Too many forks

[lordofscripts]

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Nobody can eat well when there are too many forks in the plate. Well, for months now I have been exploring several repositories. Some are dependencies of my projects, others just for curiosity in searching for development possibilities.

What did I notice? The Fork feature is being abused all over the place! Many repositories have been forked many (many!) times and when you browse the fork, there is nothing new in them, just a useless fork! The results being:

• Sometimes it is hard to see which is the real root
• Too many forks pollute the GitHub ecosystem
• Forks that do not contribute to the original repository should be removed.
• It makes it difficult to see what you are looking for if you have to browse through results that are fluff

For example, look at this one: Maroto it has 179 null-work forks!

I guess many of those are from people who perhaps want to appear as "developers" and just fork projects to have them listed in their profile, when in reality, they don't do any development.

Or perhaps some are just a result of those courses about learning Git or GitHub, in which case I believe there shouldbe some sort of playground for that purpose.

[queenofcorgis]

It sounds like they should read our two-part series on Friendly Forking: Part One and Part Two on our blog 😄 🍴

[lordofscripts]

Well, those forks I referred to don't fall in any of those two categories 😔 (and there are hundreds if not thousands of them). These are just repositories forked from the upstream and immediately abandoned with no changes of any kind. Sounds like a waste of disk space. Perhaps time for GitHub to start cleaning up and removing repos that are formed but identical (or obsoleted).

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