Project forks are easily confused with their parents
I have a fork of https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce - https://gitlab.com/nick.thomas/gitlab-ce . To ease collaboration, I've shared this fork with the gitlab-org group so all members of that group have access to it.
Today I was contacted by @dzaporozhets as he frequently confuses my fork with the original project in search results, dashboards, etc. A screenshot:
It seems that he's not the only person making this mistake. Users not in the gitlab-org group are occasionally creating issues against my fork rather than the official project:
As a short-term fix, I've just changed the project avatar to a giant fork. However, I think this speaks to some UX problems that need addressing:
- Order forks below the parent project in results?
- Clear the project avatar when forking a project?
- Give forks some other visual indication in results?
- Exclude forks entirely from default searches?
I suppose there are minor security considerations here - malicious impersonation is easy at present, although I don't know that we can guard against every possibility. Any malicious user can also remove the fork relationship explicitly, and all the solutions I've thought of so far rely on that relationship existing.
- Include a measure of project activity in ordering? Assuming forks will generally be quieter than originals
Other ideas?
/cc @tauriedavis @sarahod