Useful Forks

To list GitHub forks ordered by stars, with additional information and automatic filtering of irrelevant ones.

What is Useful Forks?

Useful Forks is a Chrome extension that inserts a button next to the 'Fork' button on GitHub repositories. It opens a new tab to scan the forks using an online tool. The extension increases the discoverability of useful forks by filtering out forks that never received any other activity on their main branch. Results can be exported as CSV or shared using a quick-link URL.

Download

Stats

By: https://useful-forks.github.io

View on Chrome Web Store

Users: 651 ▲ 28

Rating: 5.00 (7)

Version: 2.2.3 (Last updated: 2023-08-03)

Creation date: 2023-01-21

Risk impact: Moderate risk impact

Risk likelihood: Very low risk likelihood

Manifest version: 3

Host permissions:

*://github.com/*

Size: 13.72K

Email: je*****@gmail.com

Stats date:

Chrome-Stats Rank

# 34832 ▲ 613

Other rankings

#264 in Developer Tools ▲ 3

Other platforms

Not available on Firefox

Not available on Edge

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Summary

Analyze keywords

The plugin inserts a button next to the "Fork" button when you visit a GitHub repository. Clicking on it will open a new tab which will use the online tool to scan the forks. This tool aims at increasing the discoverability of useful forks of open-source projects. The criteria is simple: if a fork was created, but never received any other activity on its main branch, it is filtered out. For sharing: the results can be exported as CSV, or you can point people to the quick-link URL.

User reviews

Works. Has already saved me a lot of time and trouble. I either can't use Github's build-in search - or it's not really helpful if you want to find the actually maintained repository forks of a project.

Riia Jarvenpaa, 2024-02-17

Pros: * Open Source * Works as expected, no surprises * Fast * Easy to use Cons: * GitHub should already have this functionality built-in so someone doesn't have to build a chrome extension and website for them. I've been using Using Useful-Forks for over a year now. As an open-source contributor, software engineer and information security practitioner, I frequently find myself digging through active GitHub projects, GitHub public archives, project forks, forks of forks, or otherwise trying to trace the noodles in the spaghetti-like graph-network that often happens with open source software. I hope I never have to go back to the "old way". Useful Forks is by far the fastest, best, and easiest way to see the current "state of the world" for any GitHub Project and the entire graph of forks. It makes finding active forks a breeze. The ONLY possibly tricky part (if you aren't familiar with the process) is creating a GitHub Personal Access Token. The Personal Access Token doesn't even need any scopes, it just needs to *exist* so that you can use GitHub's API without being rate-limited as an anonymous user. If you ever need to find GitHub project forks, use Useful Forks. Instead of using GitHub's terribly designed and incomplete "Network graph" (example: https://github.com/github/gitignore/network ) or useless "Forks" tab ( https://github.com/useful-forks/useful-forks.github.io/forks ), Useful Forks crawls the graph **for you**, sorts the results, and displays the relevant projects in a clean, easy to read table. Once it's finished querying the API, you'll have a sorted list of each project fork showing: * Project Slug (owner/name) * Star Count * Fork Count * Ahead Commits * Behind Commits * Last Updated Date (YYYY-MM-DD) You can then use the client-side filter bar to further identify the best fork for your given criteria.

Rick Bowen, 2023-06-23

Best way to find active forks of GitHub repositories!

Ian Foster, 2023-04-03

View all user reviews

Safety

Risk impact

Useful Forks may not be safe to use and it requires some risky permissions. Exercise caution when installing this extension. Review carefully before installing.