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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

There's one part of the GitHub UI that I still wish they'd change: the way "contributions" are displayed.

Right now, there are accounts that seem to just fork a bunch of repositories and then do nothing with the forks. This makes those people look like massive contributors to open-source because GitHub gives them a nice "Contributions" tab with a list of popular projects under it.

They also get free advertising in reverse because they automatically appear as a "Member" of the parent project's network, despite having done nothing at all in the project!

At the very least, GitHub should require the forking person to have made some pull request that was accepted. If those forks aren't actually contributing, they shouldn't even be mentioned as a sub-network of the original (except perhaps as an option for the project maintainers to see, if they're curious where forks have occurred).

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You don't become listed as a contributor by merely forking a repo, your fork is just included in the original project's "forks" count.

The project is included in a user's "Repositories contributed to" area when that user creates a pull a pull request or files an issue.

You are listed as a contributor on a project's page only once you have had an accepted pull request.

EDIT: take one of my projects for example[0] - 152 forks recorded but only 8 people are listed as contributors.

[0] https://github.com/stonesam92/ChitChat

Yes but if you go to "Members" you see all of them, which is confusing at best. The term makes it sound like this is a list of people who are members of your project, when they're not.

And for something like the Linux kernel, it's not hard at all to find people who are about 236,000 commits behind the master.

I agree that GitHub has some accurate views but they're all mixed and it's very easy for a list to look like something that it isn't.

For anyone curious on how to get there:

https://github.com/stonesam92/ChitChat/network/members

It lists all people who have forked instead of only contributors. The 'members' tab in general doesn't appear to make much sense.

Ah, I'd never seen the "Members" tab until you pointed it out.

I agree, that could indeed be misleading and doesn't seem very useful!

I think @makecheck is talking about forked repositories showing up on a user's public account page, making them appear to be contributors to jQuery or NodeJS because they forked the repo instead of starring it.

I've seen tons of this. People forking popular projects and making minor pull requests to correct spelling or change formatting, probably so they can pad their github profile (which we're told is the new resume) and make it appear as though they're highly-active and are contributors to major projects.

If someone were forking my project to even fix a single tiny whitespace issue or typo, I'd be happy! They generally do nothing though. It seems like 90% or more of forks result in absolutely no changes whatsoever.

I kind of wish a fork wouldn't even trigger notifications or be listed on any pages until at least one commit is made to it.

Yes, I've noticed a lot of do-nothing forks too.

Most GitHub forks are because people don't understand how git refs work. I used to work at a company that required us to fork every repo we depended on and lock our dependency to the fork rather than using a package manager and git refs.

This prevents you from getting _why'd, so it's pretty reasonable.

For those that don't understand the reference:

> On 19 August 2009, why's accounts on Twitter and GitHub and his personally maintained websites went offline. Shortly before he disappeared, why the lucky stiff tweeted, "programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

On the other hand, you're now safe from users who don't understand how `git push -f` works.

Eh, 1 character or 1,000 lines of code, contributions are contributions and should be acknowledged.

The nature of the contribution is fully transparent in the commit history, so not a problem. Anyone employer who doesn't bother to look...

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