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Comment by githubsceptic | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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