Interesting. Thanks for bringing this example to my notice. I will investigate it.

It turns out that the pushed_at field returned by the API is bit weirder than I had anticipated.

At the moment, I take the fork's pushed_at value and compare it with the current repository's last commit. That is an approximation at best and I think until Github clarifies what the exact meaning of the fields 'updated_at' and 'pushed_at' is, we'll just have to make the best of the information we have. :(

The alternate is to get commits for both the source and the destination repository which would take the API call count from 2 to 3 per repo. I would be more comfortable going that route when I allow users to authenticate via the options page to avoid rate-limiting.

To address it, I will add a "may" in the explanation for the flame icon and keep this issue open, in case Github clarifies the meanings or I add authentication.

It looks like you want the pushed_at value:

Source (cahnory)

"created_at": "2011-10-28T19:06:59Z",
"updated_at": "2016-01-21T18:57:06Z",
"pushed_at": "2011-10-29T10:02:52Z",

Fork (behnam)

"created_at": "2012-01-02T04:37:08Z",
"updated_at": "2013-01-05T18:04:41Z",
"pushed_at": "2011-10-29T10:02:52Z",

Fork (unwelt)

"created_at": "2016-02-09T02:09:55Z",
"updated_at": "2016-02-09T02:09:56Z",
"pushed_at": "2016-02-09T05:42:34Z",

So it looks like the "unwelt" branch has more recent updates, but no stars. Looking at the network graph, it's obvious that unwelt has the most updates. I don't even see behnam's fork there.

So I'm guessing the pushed_at is the value you want to use. I'm not sure what the updated_at value represents, unless it refers to some unseen activity... no issues, recent comments, PRs or wiki changes match the source updateed_at time that I can find.

I wonder if we need two different labels for forks:

• Most stars
• Most recent update

Thanks for investigating it. :)

Yes, "pushed_at" does work in this case, and there is a commit in lovely forks to use this.

However, during testing, I figured out that it doesn't work for other repositories. For example, for jaz303/tipsy, which is an example in the README, we see the following:

  "created_at": "2008-06-08T18:48:00Z",
  "updated_at": "2016-02-22T14:47:16Z",
  "pushed_at": "2015-12-15T05:55:21Z",

And for the best fork CloCkWeRX/tipsy, we see the following:

  "created_at": "2013-01-23T01:15:11Z",
  "updated_at": "2016-02-15T22:27:02Z",
  "pushed_at": "2015-01-02T03:15:48Z",

Here, the pushed_at leads one to believe that the repositories match up. However, the fork actually contains many more commits than the origin, which hasn't been touched in the past 2 years.

I asked @GithubEngg on Twitter about this, presenting a hypothesis, but haven't heard back from them.

I may write have written to Ivan, who answered this question on SO a while back. However, that information seems to be incomplete/outdated now.

With Ivan's input, I have switched to an heuristic based on Compare API. I am testing it locally and hope to release it to Chrome store/Firefox addons soon.

@Mottie I released the extension(s) earlier today. The Chrome extension update is live while the Firefox addon will take a while to get a preliminary review and then some to get to the users.

Could you close the issue after confirming that it works?

Thanks!

It's looking good! Thanks for all your hard work!