
More than anything, GitHub projects need a big “active/not active” sign - hoodoof
There needs to be a blindlingly obvious statement on each github repo that declares, in the opinion of the repository owner, if this project is active or not.<p>The comments so far are saying that there are a number of methods to infer if a project is <i>ACTUALLY</i> active.  Indeed there are.<p>I&#x27;m talking about something different though - a statement from the project owner about whether or not <i>they deem it to be active</i>.  Important difference.
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jasonkester
If they do this, they'll need a third option: "Done".

There's a big difference between a project that's not seeing contributions
because the author lost interest halfway through, and a project that is
feature complete and was built sanely so that it doesn't need any ongoing
attention.

Pretty much everything I have up on Github (and elsewhere) falls into that
"Done" category. And I get emails several times a year asking if various
libraries have been "abandoned".

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hoodoof
Good idea.

There really is a need to know where a given project is at.

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brudgers
A repository administrator able and willing to switch its tag to "inactive"
can just edit the readme to start with "this project is
inactive/abandoned/etc."

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orionblastar
B2 was once an inactive blog project until someone forked it and called it
Wordpress.

See a project you like? Fork it and email the authors if they want to work
with you on it. Be proactive and assertive.

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wingerlang
Looking at the last commit or issue tracker usually makes it obvious. I also
don't think repo owners will go and update all repos based on activeness or
not manually.

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wirddin
OR an "Active X days ago" message somewhere near the name. Where activity can
mean a closed Issue / Comment by a contributor or a commit. Will save some
research time.

P.S.: Weekend Hack : Build a Chrome extension for the same.

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erkose
You could just look at the graphs section.

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mrout
The only people I see complain about this sort of thing are people that just
want to leech off others' work without contributing back.

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wapz
Have you ever forked a repo then made a pull request to later find out the
owner wants nothing to do with the project anymore? Your point may be valid
for many users but it's not okay to discredit the op's idea.

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mrout
No, I haven't. I don't make a pull request if the project is obviously
abandoned, which is trivial to find out: it shows the dates of the most recent
updates to each file/directory in the root of the project, you can see the
timestamps of the most recent 20ish commits with one click on Github, etc.

