Spare forks with downstream forkers

Bulk-deleting forks: spare forks others forked. Downstream fork = real user chose your fork as upstream

When deleting forks in bulk (cleanup, scope-cut, profile housekeeping), the spare-list is keyed on downstream forks, not stars:

• stars — cheap signal. Someone clicked once. Delete is fine.
• downstream forks — someone forked YOUR fork. They picked your fork specifically as their upstream. Deleting breaks their parent link.

Applied 2026-06-26 during the chirag127 fork cleanup. 48 forks audited ? 43 deleted, 5 spared because they had =1 downstream forker. Spared list: Terabox-DL (10 downstream), Book-For-Programmers (2), SOCKS-Proxy-Checker, goggles-quickstart, human-eval.

How to check before bulk-deleting:

gh repo list <user> --fork --limit 500 --json name,stargazerCount,forkCount \
  --jq '[.[] | select(.forkCount > 0)] | .[].name'

The output is your spare-list. Everything else is fair game.

Why not also spare by stars:

• Stars cost nothing — they accumulate from passive browsing.
• A 5-star fork with 0 downstream forks: nobody is depending on it.
• A 0-star fork with 1 downstream fork: somebody IS depending on it.

The asymmetry is the whole point. Downstream forks are commitments, not approvals.

Related:

• fork-features-also-as-upstream-issues — for forks we DO keep, file upstream issues for our patches.
• fs-own-frk-split — repos/frk/<slug>/ is where forks we ARE keeping live.
• knowledge-deletion-not-supersession — same delete-don’t-mark-as-stale instinct.

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