What is going on with recent bots forking repos

[u/FormationHeaven]

I have a project a couple of thousand of stars and 37 forks until recently. I haven't announced a new version for over 6 months and have never promoted it during that time.

Stars trickled in at a usual way, a couple of stars every week. Now up until 4 days ago i had 37 forks, hardly anyone forks my project because its a bit difficult to contribute without domain knowledge. Most fork to either add a small tweak or to package the project for their distro or fork and open a pr to contribute something. (but for contributions obviously more people just clone the thing). It was very rare to fork it.

Now 4 days ago i got 2 forks in a row 2 days ago another fork, today another fork.

The first 2 happened at the same time like 30 minutes apart. They are brand new accounts with 2 profile pics, i noticed they had like 1-2 stars in total and and they starred the same projects exactly

And now every 2 days some random people who just created their brand new account are doing the exact same thing they have like 5 repo's all forked at the same day of their account creation and no other activity

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Is this some type of star farming which fork random repo's which they get from awesome lists to appear like a more genuine account so they can boost the stars of certain other repos?

edit : holy after 2 minutes of typing this i just checked my github and there was another fork 1 hour ago

[u/Torutofu_Raeva]

my guess is account farming, forks and stars make a new account look legit before they push some malicious package or pitch later

[u/FormationHeaven → u/Torutofu_Raeva]

The make a new account look legit is my guess. I'm going to do a little snooping around myself before reporting them to gtihub.

[u/kincaidDev]

Github has been overtaken by growth hackers

[u/az987654]

Stars and forks are meaningless.

GH is not social media.

[u/FormationHeaven → u/az987654]

I don't care about forks or stars, im curious about the bot activity.

Im tryning to get the point across that i have a niche project not that famous and the fork count has been the same for months upon months and 4 days ago i have forks coming every day or so.

This is bot activity and im trying to figure out wth is happening and why/how they are using my repo and others.

[u/az987654 → u/FormationHeaven]

It's bots.

Now... what does that fact matter? what are you going to do differently? What are you going to do about it?

It does not matter.

[u/FormationHeaven → u/az987654]

You are human, you know what drives humans? curiosity . Don't you have any curiosity to figure out why is this happening and for what reason

[u/az987654 → u/FormationHeaven]

Nope, because the outcome has zero impact on what I do. I'll be curious about things that affect me, things that would impact my decision making process.

I painted a canvas because I wanted to make art, I didn't paint my canvas differently because I thought a million people would look at it.

[u/under_ice → u/az987654]

Even bots can be dicks it appears.

[u/az987654 → u/under_ice]

Y'all are clowns, I'll be using GH for what it is, a code repo

[u/AirshipCommand]

This pattern is usually account warming. New accounts fork and star a pile of random repos so the profile looks lived in before it gets used for something. You can check a forker's profile and see whether the forks are all created within minutes of the account itself. Nothing in your repo is at risk from a bare fork, and the fork only has the code that's already public. If you do want to report one, the abuse report on the user's profile page works better than flagging the repo.