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Comment by exciteabletom | Hacker News Reader

This problem could be solved if Github simply sorted the list of forks by stars instead of alphabetically.

More active repos don't necessarily have more stars, maybe a better way to sort would be to have main repo followed by number of commits ahead, then number of commits behind. Most often what I find is a repo will have 3-5 dozen forks and the vast majority will either be far behind or have one or two localizations. It is very rare that I find something that someone has really forked and started doing active development on.

I think sorting forks by most recent commit would good enough. Not sure why GitHub doesn't do more to help with discoverability

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I think it's just a blind spot they have, although back in the day a GitHubber told me it was also about maintaining an agnostic approach to governance.

btw, iirc GitLab does give you the option of sorting by most recent commit.

That is a good idea but they actually also should do:

- hide any repo that hasn't seen any commits

- show commits ahead and behind as well as number of tags

- include issue tracker activity

- highlight those forks that were renamed which is often an indicator of a new package/gem being released from this fork

- Show a link from the main page of a repository to the most active fork to make it clear that there is an active fork at all.

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