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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

If maintainers have withdrawn from the project, may be it should be forked by those who are ready to contribute?

Is there a way on GitHub to filter by most active forks? All I get when I click on the Forks page is this warning: "Woah, this network is huge! We’re showing only some of this network’s repositories."

This would be valuable for a number of projects that have been abandoned or see infrequent updates while a fork (that usually has to be found by word of mouth or Google) is significantly more active.

I wish GitHub had a better interface to browse forks, right now it just displays a single list and requires you to search through individual forks to find any meaningful changes.

They also featured "fork this project" prominently for a while leading to many novice Git users forking projects unnecessarily, which pollutes the list of forks.

Agreed. That interface could be so much easier to navigate. Might be easier on a touch interface.

Even some simple ordering by recency of activity would be a vast improvement.

Or some 'momentum' to the scrolling of the tree.

It should, and it likely will be, since it is a popular piece of software. However, it is usually better to ask the maintainer to step down and continue his work without forking it. That saves everybody (distro packagers, users) a lot of time and effort.

> and continue his work without forking it

This is how you get in the same situation as uBlock.

Are there any other examples?

Yes, in rare, flukish circumstances. Most of the time, there are no issues.

I guess it is quite hard to get traction on a branch compared to take over the original project.

"17,727 commits"

It most feel quite futile to keep up with breaking changes from Youtube's side in the long run? Maybe they should be more liberal in what contributors they accept. Seems like two guys did the most commits.

that's not just youtube. youtube-dl supports a lot of sites.

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