Often times I find a interesting or useful project on Github that is abandoned and has some issues. Then I hope that someone already forked the repository and continued working on it. To find a fresh fork, I had to go to the Insights-tab in the repository, click on “Forks” and then look at all the listed forks to see if there is an active one. Tedious!
Here are two projects that try to fix this:
Fork Freshness‘ results look nice - take a look at this example: https://forkfreshness.com/Shopify/active_shipping. However to get this result, I have to tweet the repository-URL to a twitter account. That’s almost as tedious as checking the forks manually.
Active Github Forks immediatly displays the results and organizes it in a neat, sortable table. My go-to solution to find fresh forks.
NEW: Here are two more ways to do this
With a search modifier
There is a way to filter out forks in your GitHub search to only those that were created recently, using the “fork:only” search modifier. To find recent forks for a repository, you can use the following search query (replace MYREPOSITORY with the repository you are looking for), where YYYY-MM-DD is the date you would like to start searching from.
Github now has this functionality included!
Open your repository and click on the forks, there you can change to a new list view that let’s you filter the forks:
The functionality is in beta right now - check this discussion for more information!