I have been doing a lot of commits lately. Sadly, none of my dozens of commits are included in my total contribution count on GitHub. Why? Because all those commits were to a forked repository. It’s 2019, and I think it’s plain stupid.
I love GitHub, but if there was one thing I’d like to fix about GitHub it would be this. It’s understandable why GitHub made this rule back in the day when they were introducing the contributions map/tracker thingy. Perhaps it was a decent guard against simply copying someone else’s work and adding a few minor commits here and there just to boost your “score”.
But it’s 2019; it’s modern times. Just think about it. One could be forking from a base/boilerplate repository that contains non-substantial code to build something substantial on top of it. This is exactly how I have been using forks lately. As part of following along the Flutter bootcamp-style course, I created a bunch of forks from the course creator’s boilerplates and transformed them into proper apps. I deserve to be recognized for that! It’s as simple as that.
Here’s what GitHub’s documentation has to say about how contributions are counted:
Commits made in a fork will not count toward your contributions. To make them count, you must do one of the following:
Why are my contributions not showing up on my profile?
1. Open a pull request to have your changes merged into the parent repository.
2. To detach the fork and turn it into a standalone repository on GitHub, contact GitHub Support or GitHub Premium Support. If the fork has forks of its own, let support know if the forks should move with your repository into a new network or remain in the current network. For more information, see “About forks.”
Those two options are not plausible every time, since:
- Opening a pull request in the parent repository just does not make sense when the upstream is intentionally boilerplate. Asking its author to merge your commits into it would be like asking them to publicly publish the solution to their puzzle.
- Contact GitHub support? Really? Who has the time and patience to do that when you’re working with dozens of forks?
GitHub, if you are listening at all, PLEASE FIX THIS!