[danskil]

interesting idea, though in keeping away from feature bloat, wouldn't it be much much easier, and just as effective to put that information in the read me?

I realize the you said they don't want to but the info there, but why? If you really wanted to abandon the project why not just close the repo, which would shift all your traffic to another fork?

If github implemented this feature, I wouldn't be upset, but it seems very single purpose. Maybe a status flag, so the author can not just say "abandoned", but "up to date", or "active" though again, all of that can be seen through the commit history.

Just my 2 cents.

[cookiecaper]

I agree that while this is a good idea, Github probably has bigger fish to fry and that at this point it should do fine to put the notice at the top of the README.

Perhaps someone can add the feature to the open-source Gitorious.