How do you use the new forks list view?

[tomthorogood]

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Product Feedback

Body

👋 We want to know what you think of the new repository forks list!

This feature is only enabled for a limited audience while we get it ready for the general public!

You can find this new view by heading to https://github.com/<owner>/<repository>/forks, or by clicking the "Try the new list view" link from the fork tree view (/network/members).

Some feedback we're interested in hearing:

• What were you looking for when you visited the forks list?
• Did you find what you were looking for?
• If you did not find what you were looking for, what do you think could have helped you?
• What could we do to make this an even better experience for you?
• Is there anything else we should know?

[larrywest]

Ummm... is this only visible to the repo owner?

In powermock/powermock, I only see the old view, with no offer to try the new list view (which I would love, given that there are 576 forks).

---

Update: to be clear, I went to

https://github.com/powermock/powermock/forks

and it redirected me to

https://github.com/powermock/powermock/network/members

---

[tomthorogood]

Thank you for pointing this out, and sorry for the confusion; this has been released to a limited audience, but is not yet publicly available. This discussion was a place for us to seek feedback from users who have access to this feature. I'll edit the description to make this clearer.

[tomthorogood]

@larrywest this feature has now been released to all GitHub users!

[Kesia33]

Sério

[jdevfullstack]

I can't see it yet with my own repo that has forks

[tomthorogood]

Sorry for the confusion; this has been released to a limited audience, but is not yet publicly available. This discussion was a place for us to seek feedback from users who have access to this feature. I'll edit the description to make this clearer. (And, sorry for the copypasta response!)

[tomthorogood]

Hi @jdevstatic, this feature is now available for all GitHub users!

[allakew]

good

[bagder]

I like it!

It would be interesting for me to view forks that have (a lot of) commits ahead of master, ie that seems to work on things. And also possibly to exclude forks that simply are XXXX commits behind, since those are obviously just stale.

[p2edwards]

Yep, I tend to open all forks in new tabs just to see who added any commits of their own (usually <10% of forks)

[NikLeberg]

+1
I'm also very interested in having a This branch is x commits ahead filter or similar. My use case would be is to identify forks that gained momentum after the main fork dies off or forks that have interesting new features.

[reinder]

+1 this is exactly why I visit the list, I'd like to see if anything happens on a fork, either commits ahead or if they started new branches.

[ykwarteng]

+1 This is the only reason why I'll visit that page. Please add if you can. Thank you.

[tukusejssirs]

Besides having the commit difference indicator (up-to-date, n commit(s) behind, n commit(s) ahead), I’d like to have an option to show all forks, not only forks from the past (max) 5 years, regardless of type.

[jtaala]

Sounds great - I would be super interested to test this out (alas, I'm not part of the limited audience).

[tomthorogood]

Hi @jtaala, this feature is now enabled for all GitHub users!

[jtaala]

Thanks @tomthorogood for the heads-up!

[bagder]

I would like to see a counter showing the number of matches (perhaps "of totally N forks") as I change the different filtering options.

[bagder]

UI wise, I expected "filter" to be inclusive but the fact that archived is enabled by default and based on how it seems to work the filter is actually excluding forks from the list. This could possibly be made a little clearer with polished wording.

[davidrichmond-asurion]

Yes, this is very confusing. Shows 4 forks out of 15 by default. Not-filtering should be the default. And not-filtering should show them all, not none! These repos are in a private org, perhaps that's affecting the view - but I have read access to all and the forks list with filters in any setting is still incomplete.

[jack-mil]

I agree, my initial experience when looking at the new view was an empty list that said "No forked repositories", when I knew for a fact that there are several (stale) forks. I would like an overview of all forks by default, and then filter if looking for specifics.
Over all , a great feature that will be really useful to observe forks!

[some-natalie]

I love it! It lets me understand what forks are just "copies" and which are actively changing things :)

[dluc]

the list seems broken, I see only 1 fork in the list, regardless of how I set the filters. For a second I thought all forks had been deleted until I found the link to switch back to the old UI.

[tomthorogood]

Thank you for letting us know! If you're willing, please submit a request to our support team with the details of the repository you are seeing issues with, so we can investigate any discrepancies.

[davidrichmond-asurion]

Having the same issue. It only shows some forks.

[tomthorogood]

We are investigating discrepancies here. Some finding so far:

• The number of forks listed on a repository's home page is sometimes inaccurate, because it represents the number of forks in the entire network (all forks, and forks of forks, show the same number as the root repository). This can lead to surprising behavior in the Forks view, where you might be expecting forks that aren't actually there.
• The new forks view takes special care not to show forks you don't have access to, but we've learned that even fork owners can't see their own private forks on the Forks view. If a repo has only private forks, the list will appear empty, even though the number of forks displayed may show more than are available. We have fixed access discrepancies!
• We're investigating the root cause for Enterprised Managed Users (EMUs) not seeing forks that should be accessible to them. We have fixed this!

[heyitsbench]

I would ask that an "All" option be listed under Repository Type, as I at least prefer having a full list option available.

[tomthorogood]

Thank you for this feedback. As a workaround, if you select all of Active, Inactive, and Archived, you can achieve this.

We are also working on an update to make it clear that users can select multiple options.

[heyitsbench]

Ah, didn't know I could select more than one option. In that case, making that clearer would be appreciated. Thank you for the quick response!

[tomthorogood]

@heyitsbench We've released an updated version of this feature to include checkboxes to make the multi-select behavior clearer. Thanks so much for your feedback and patience!

[MartinX3]

@tomthorogood
I tagged every checkbox and it resulted into an empty list.
If I use only the correct checkboxes matching the results, I get my entries.

Also it slowly reloads between every click while ticking every checkbox.

[rafaol]

Would there be an "all time" option for the "period" filter added later on? At the moment I can only see forks for up to a maximum of 5 years, and many repositories are older than that.

[rdwebdesign]

There are active forks older than 5 years.
Adding a new All time option or simply allowing disable/no selection the Period filter would be great.

[candideu]

Agreed! Came here to say the same thing.

[Murplugg]

Definitely add an "All time" view as 5 years throws away interesting forks older than that...

[tomthorogood]

Hi @rafaol, @xlwiz2k, @rdwebdesign, @candideu, @Murplugg: Just wanted to let you know that we've added the "All time" option! There is still a cap of 2,500 browseable forks (the "tree view" caps at 1,000), but for smaller networks, this should allow folks to find all visible forks.

Soon we will also add an option to save your default search parameters, so you'll always be able to have "All time" selected by default!

[Exagone313]

In case you don't see the All time option, make sure you are logged in.

[0xacx]

This is a nice feature and filtering by Active repos really helps and saves some time. What I would like to have in the same view, is the status of the repo relative to the fork parent, as in "4 commits ahead: 20 commits behind". To me that would be very helpful as I would immediately be able to check which repo adds changes and how far from the parent repo it is.

[tomthorogood]

Thank you @0xacx! We are hoping to be able to include the ahead/behind summary in a future update, as it's a much requested feature.

[arye-eidelman]

The layout on mobile is very spread out.
Can the links for stars, forks, issues, and pulls all go one one line, followed by the created and updated text on the next?

[AireagoirSteam]

For forks I'd love to see where it organises newest updated forks.
As in which forked repo has been updated recently.
Yes I know there's an extension for this but something official would be better.

[rdwebdesign]

Using flex-wrap: wrap for the flex container and width: 100% for the Created and Updated lines would result in a better mobile layout:

[tomthorogood]

@AireagoirSteam this new forks page does offer a view of most recently updated forks. The "updated" time represents the last push to any branch of the forked repository. But, perhaps I am misunderstanding your request. Please let me know if I'm not getting it right!

[tomthorogood]

@arye-eidelman Thanks for the feedback about the mobile layout!

[slambo311]

Although I personally prefer the tree view, I do appreciate that the list view has more details. How about we mix the two together, by having some dropdown or something like that show the forks of other forks (subforks?)

[mascardoso]

Apologies if this is not the proper place. but why are we not able to show also who clicked "Use this template"?

[markphip]

Should this work with GHEC EMU? I look at a repository with 4 forks (including one where I just submitted a PR from a fork) and the page just says "No one has forked this repository yet"

[tomthorogood]

Hi @markphip, I'll open an issue to investigate the UX for GHEC users; this might also explain an issue another user had. Thanks for letting us know!

[bewuethr]

I don't see any forks in the new view in GHEC without EMU, either.

[tomthorogood]

Hi @bewuethr, is this still a problem for you? We rolled out a fix yesterday that should have fixed Forks visibility problems, but I wanted to follow and make sure you aren't experiencing a different bug. thank you!

[bewuethr]

I can see the new view now, thanks!

[redtide]

Is the tree going to be replaced or can it stay as option?

[rosenpin]

It would be great if the new view included an option to view/filter repos by their latest commit/number of commits ahead of the source repo.
This is especially useful for deprecated projects where you want to look for an up to date fork.
Currently the best way to do that is to filter by stars/forks which doesn't really say much in the case of smaller projects.

[sweharris]

I don't have ultra-popular repos; most of what I do has limited interest (eg retro computing). As a result, I'm not too interested in "recent forks" or "forks with activity". If I'm looking at forks then I want to see everyone who has forked my code, whether they've changed it or not. That gives me an indication of interest in my code.

So the old "tree" format is much more useful than the new design.

This may be mitigated by having an "all time" and "all types" quick selection.

[redtide]

As a result, I'm not too interested in "recent forks" or "forks with activity".

What if someone else have an old/abandoned project you are interests in, so you do a git fork of it?

This may be mitigated by having an "all time" and "all types" quick selection.

I would add "by default". (I also preferred the tree for this reason too)

[malcolmocean]

It seems to me that the forks view is maybe optimized for the upstream repo owner, but as someone browsing repos, I have very different careabouts.

When I view the forks of someone else's codebase I'm considering using, I'm often seeking to answer specific questions, and I would love if the forks view helped me answer those questions.

One of the main questions I'm seeking is:

Has somebody else already forked this repo and made the fix (or added the feature) I want?

To this end, it would be AMAZING to be able to search the diffs between the forks and the originals (both the code and the commit messages).

Again with the aim of helping people find if a fork they're looking for exists, I also think it would be good to include a step when forking of writing a sentence about why you made the fork. Optional, but personally I think would be best if it's a default that you have to click to skip, since it would generate so much useful metadata. And maybe you could even reference an issue from the original repo? That'd be cool. I'm aware that sometimes a fork starts out to fix one bug & make a PR, and ends up spinning off in a totally different direction, so you could make the field editable later (which people would probably be fairly motivated to do if they have an active fork). This would be like the About field on repos in the first place.

This would also help me skim to get answers to with my other main question:

What other interesting things have people done with this repo?

To that end, I'd want to filter out any forks that have no new commits that aren't already in the original upstream repo. Personally I think this should be a default setting, or that forks with no additional changes shouldn't even show up in the fork count! Obviously it would still be good to have SOME way to see those, since it's sometimes interesting to be able to see the history of people pushing the "fork" button even if they didn't do anything more.

Oh—I'm looking at the existing filter system, which offers filtering by active (/push activity) which sounds like what I'm looking for above except that it ALSO includes forks that made a pull request which then got merged back into the original, so they now no longer contain anything of functional interest (they may be of historical interest). I want to see only forks that have commits that aren't in the original repo.

And I'd also like to be able to sort by # of additional commits or size of additional commits, since something that has only 1 commit or 1 line/file change is, on average, going to be less interesting than something with many changes.

Thanks! I'm very excited you're asking for feedback! I've been wanting the forks view to improve for awhile. It seems to me that there's no reason not to offer multiple views, given the different use cases.

[payne911]

I want to see only forks that have commits that aren't in the original repo.

Those are the ahead commits. I'm sure that feature will be added in this new GitHub forks list view, but in the meantime feel free to use this tool: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/useful-forks/aflbdmaojedofngiigjpnlabhginodbf

[MariaEbling]

A newly created fork should be considered active!

[RaSan147]

Tree view and main oage stat shows 4 fork, but tree view shows only 2, (other 2 are newly forked)

[FFdhorkin]

This is generally a big improvement, but the information I really care about when looking at forks is this sort of info, which still isn't shown in the new view:

[payne911]

Until that feature gets added, you may look into using this tool: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/useful-forks/aflbdmaojedofngiigjpnlabhginodbf

[jsoref]

So... I don't know where to begin...

Fork count is illogical

https://github.com/jsoref/checkout-merge/forks

The top area says Fork (0)

https://github.com/check-spelling/checkout-merge/forks

The top area says Fork (1)

Lies about repositories never having been forked

The bottom area lies:

No one has forked this repository yet

It may be true that there are no existing forks, but I know that someone forked this repository (and then later deleted their fork).

It would be correct to say There are no existing forks of this repository at this time

As GitHub probably doesn't want to retain information about forks that have been deleted, it's probably not worth trying to use any other text.

Graph view can show counts that don't match the list

Apparently while the forked repository was forked the fork count showed 2, but the graph view didn't show the fork because it had no commits of its own.

That's obviously confusing, and probably part of the reason that the newer list view was introduced

Fork count doesn't update well

I'd expect the fork count to update when someone deletes a fork, but apparently this didn't happen, and I had to refresh to discover that the number had decreased.

[jsoref]

• What were you looking for when you visited the forks list?
  • Today I was trying to figure out if two repositories are related, as here, I was trying to figure out why a commit in my personal checkout-merge repository wasn't visible in my organization's checkout-merge repository (the answer is that they aren't in the same fork network -- based on the graph it's apparent that I intentionally walled them off, one is a playground and the other is for proper releases)
• Did you find what you were looking for?
  • Yes, but only after hitting all sorts of other points of confusion
• If you did not find what you were looking for, what do you think could have helped you?
  • Well, a quick way to confirm that two repositories are github-fork-related would have helped. I'm not sure how often normal people do this, but, here it would have been helpful.
• What could we do to make this an even better experience for you?
  • Fork counts shouldn't lie
  • The graph view should tell me how many forks it isn't showing so that I have a sense of things
• Is there anything else we should know?
  • Lies do not improve my faith in systems. Any time a user is trying to answer a question, and trips on a lie, they're even less likely to trust the rest of the data that's presented. It's always better to be less definitive than to state something that can turn out to be a lie.

[Wolvverine]

The filters lack the ability to filter by the time of the last commit, the fork made a month ago from a source from 2 years ago , the activity has a month ago but is old.

Also missing is information about which fork a given fork is unless it is made directly from root.

[simonwiles]

I'm struggling with this (found this discussion while googling for some help). I'm browsing a repo that reports one fork, but there is no combination of filters I can use to find that one fork. I've tried every combination of filters (and boy was it clunky and cumbersome to do so). If there's only one fork, probably an awkward complicated filter mechanism isn't needed? I just want to find the one fork of this repo and see if someone did something interesting with it.

[redtide]

Unsubscribing, please keep also the tree if you decide to adopt this madness.

[tomthorogood]

Hi folks,

First, I wanted to thank you all for the great feedback. It really helped us hone and focus our efforts improving the new forks view.

I am going to close this discussion, as it seems as though we've addressed (or are working to address) the most-needed improvements to this view, and this discussion is no longer linked to the new view. The improvements that we can't yet address, but want to, are adequately documented in our backlog.

We have two upcoming features in flight that are currently in testing.

• We are adding an All time option to the Period dropdown. This has been released!
• We are adding a button to Save defaults so that you can search your way, and have your default parameters follow you when browsing forks.

We think these two improvements will greatly improve the usability of the new view for most users.

Some people are dealing with very large fork networks; those people need adequate searching and filtering to find relevant repositories for their needs. Other people are dealing with small fork networks, and don't need (or want) advanced filtering capabilities.

The default options we selected were targeted toward larger fork networks, with some of our more complex use cases in mind, and that has caused a lot of confusion for people who are browsing smaller networks. Additionally, the lack of ability to search by "All time" was hiding forks that should have been visible.

Despite the fact that we still have more love to give to the forks view, we're so happy that the new searchable list view has helped maintainers find forks that are meaningful to them, and that we now have a better way to give you more insights into repository fork networks in the future!

We really appreciate your feedback while we prioritized, optimized, and improved this implementation! We can't wait to bring you more improvements soon!

[payne911]

Will there be a way to see the amount of ahead commits, and filter by those as well? It's the single most useful feature this page view could offer for people looking to find useful forks. :)

Something close to what https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/useful-forks/aflbdmaojedofngiigjpnlabhginodbf offers.

In any case, thanks for working on this!

[ziljah]

Thank you, it's over

[Olybok35]

It was awesome!

[devnoname120]

Two years later and useful-forks.github.io is still miles ahead in terms of usefulness. So much that I never use GitHub's forks list.

Here is what https://devnoname120.github.io/useful-forks looks like:

And for comparison here is what GitHub forks view looks like:

[tukusejssirs]

I didn’t know about useful-forks.github.io, thanks for sharing! 🙏

[MattCrBoom]

hBd96