Yes, it’s intended.....blocked users cannot fork repos to prevent abuse or unwanted association. This doesn’t violate free software freedoms because the code is still publicly accessible and can be copied or modified outside GitHub.

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Hello, I was about to open an issue about this very thing.

A project I work on recently voted to block a user that is known to argue things in bad faith, and pick constant fights with other users. We are trying to foster a positive and helpful community, and this individual was directly opposed to this goal. After blocking them, I found out that blocked users are unable to fork the repository through github -- this feels very strange to me for 2 main reasons:

• It's pointless.
  • The user can just clone and push to another repo. This is by definition a fork, so blocking forking on github does not actually block forks, it blocks the fork button.
  • By not actually blocking forking (which would be impossible), the "social link" isn't broken. If a bad actor makes a protest fork while the fork button is blocked, there very much still is a social link there.
• It's against the spirit of open source.
  • We don't want them contributing upstream, but they should be allowed to do whatever they want downstream.
  • Even if what they do downstream we disagree with. We actively want them to go and create things with our work, we just don't want them to contribute back to us.

My 2 proposed solutions:

• Don't block the fork button
• Add an organization level setting which dictates what a blocked user can/cannot do. I've never (afiak) been blocked, so I'm not sure what privileges they lose. These are the granular settings that I think would make sense (and why), in increasing order of severity
  • disallow contribution
    • If a user is known to contribute low quality code, they can be blocked from opening PRs
  • disallow interaction
    • User cannot do anything that would appear in the repo. This means no comments, discussions, reviews, PRs, reactions, etc
  • disallow access
    • Block anything you would need to be logged in for. That means access to build artifacts, pressing the fork button, cloning through ssh, using the search feature, etc

Option 1 is simpler, and good enough I think. Option 2 is a better solution, but would take some effort to implement

Is git clone available? Maybe just clone and push to a new repo. The fork relation doesn't make sense when blocked by its original owner because creating PR isn't allowed.

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I want to raise an objection against this proposal. I think that blocking as user / organization should prevent the blocked person from all interactions including forking.

Reason why I say this is to stop AI merchants from forking repositories and letting clankers loose on them.

Is this somewhat easily circumvented? Sure, maybe. But it at least introduces some friction into the lives of AI merchants and I personally would like them to experience as much pushback as humanly possible.

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