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How do I find orphaned forks for a deleted gist or GitHub repo


Because the Twitter algorithm is Weird™️, this super old tweet come through my feed very recently and I decided I'd like to try out the gist it links to.

Unfortunately, sometime in the 5 years since that tweet was sent, the gist has either been deleted or made private1. Fortunately, I found the gist on the Wayback Machine. Problem solved! Right?

I could just copy-paste the file into a gist of my own for posterity, but I notice that there were 25 forks as of the Wayback snapshot. According to this documentation it seems like...

...one of the existing public forks [should have been] chosen to be the new parent repository.

...assuming Gists have the same behaviour as vanilla repositories. Sadly, Wayback has not cached a list of who those forks belong(ed) to. If I want to follow along with that gist and its forks, how do I find them?


1: fwiw - it looks like the original author deleted their GitHub account very recently


Solution

  • I was able to find the forks by going to gist.github.com and copying a string from your wayback link in the search box (seeyouspacecowboy.sh).

    This search provided me with 2 search results, one of which showed "25 forks". Clicking that gist allowed me to see all 25 forks of the Gist.