Search and mine much more information about forks on the Network Graph

[nealmcb]

There have been several notable critiques of the GitHub "network graph" premise and functionality, e.g.

• GitHub, your network graph sucks!
• GitHub forking has one big flaw - zbowling blag
  Active forks highlighter #562 already discusses how GitHub should provide much better highlighting of the most active forks (and even has a link to the helpful third-party "Lovely Forks" extension which fills some of that information in).

So this issue will focus on the request to be able to "search all commits on forks from this project for specific keywords" which is nicely explained in the link in the first bullet above.

Beyond that, I'd love to see either GitHub or an independent site go much further in helping people mine the forks of a project for good information, popular commits, shared issues, and the like, in the spirit of git itself. As the "big flaw" link nicely explains, github with its focus on a single privileged "root" node is fundamentally out-of-sync with the underlying distributed nature of git. It seems that Bitbucket — The Git solution for professional teams offers some lessons in better approaches to all this.

This issue was prompted by my frustrations trying to figure out which forks of dozencrows/motion: Network Graph to focus on. The "root" fork is woefully out-of-date, the ones that show up when you look at the network are all old, and the half-dozen that are most recently active don't seem to have found each other. A very sad example of the problems laid out above, and a need for better tools to help the community recover from an inactive root fork.