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Why do some people fork repos but make no changes to them? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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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?

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[–] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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