"GitHub will detach public forks of the public repository and put them into a new network."
"Stars and watchers for this repository will be permanently erased"
> Current forks will remain public and will be detached from this repository.
If I'm not mistaken when they are back public again everyone will need to update their origin ?
This sentence seems to be about GitHub internally treating forked repos as branches of the original repo to save space (as well as displaying "fork of X" in the UI), and there's no way to manually set that relationship other than the fork button. GitHub would have to manually reset that if they wanted to. (This setup is what allows those fake commit URLs where you use the URL of the original repo plus the commit hash of a commit in a fork.)
And GitHub might have implemented something that let's them restore it after it wasn't possible before, as it's been 2 yrs since.
Lots of possibilities that might change the outcome if elastic is lucky
"In our case, however, they refuse to do that, citing undesirable side effects and the cost of resources. We even offered GitHub financial compensation for any resources required. But, sadly, they declined. They have other priorities than resurrecting the community of one of the oldest and most popular community projects on their platform."
Certainly possible they implemented a way to do this over the last 2 years.
This is even more painful for small-to-midsize projects whose star counts help distinguish them.