I’ve seen some projects on GitHub (howdy being one of them that came to mind) where there are forks, but when I check the forks out they are either unchanged, or are behind by a few commits. I was wondering why this would happen. It couldn’t be for archival purposes, could it?
Maybe some people don’t delete the fork after their PR is done.
In my case, I found another explanation.
Sometimes, a random person comes and forks one of my repos. I check their profile, and it’s a techbro student with hundreds of forked repos without any commits. With their bio referencing AI or some shit.
I’m pretty sure these people fork a lot of repos just to pad their CV or something. Make it look like you have a lot of repos. Because when you go to someone’s profile, it is not clear that a repo is a fork instead of their own creation.
When you visit someone’s profile on github it defaults to
source. It won’t show forks at all for a ‘normal’ visitor to a profile. You have to explicitly clear the filter to see forks.Maybe they changed the defaults. I stopped using GitHub after they trained their AI over private repos.
But I remember clearly that I was annoyed when looking at my own repos because my forks (for actually doing PRs) would show at the top instead of my own repos.
It’s been that way for many years, I’d say at least 4 or 5? Long before all this ai nonsense.
yeah, makes sense. The cynical part of my mind also led me to your 2nd explanation. :)