useful-forks.github.io

Useful Forks answers the question GitHub's fork list can't: which of these hundreds of forks actually did anything? Paste a repo and it lists the forks ranked by stars, drops the ones that never pushed a commit, digs into forks of forks, and exports CSV. There's a website, Chrome and Firefox extensions that add a button on GitHub, and a bookmarklet. MIT.

It runs entirely in your browser against GitHub's API, with no backend. Small repos need no token; big ones will hit GitHub's rate limit, and then you add a token, which stays in your browser's local storage. Give it one with no scopes.

Anyone whose favorite project went quiet and wants the fork that kept going: this is the tool. Maintainers can use it to find patches worth pulling back upstream.

The catch: the site still loads an old Google Analytics tag that logs which repos you search. Google shut down that version of Analytics, so it's probably collecting nothing, but it's still there.