[super_trooper]

When you click the button to make a repo private, you first have to acknowledge that you will lose all of your stars among other things. Losing stars is literally the first bullet point. Then you have to type the repo name as acknowledgement before you can make private. PR stunt?

Make private:

Hide this repository from the public.

    You will permanently lose:
        All stars and watchers of this repository.
        All pages published from this repository.
    Dependency graph will remain enabled. Leaving them enabled grants us permission to perform read-only analysis on this repository.

[bombcar]

Also of interest for those who care - you can contact GitHub support and they will remove the link to the repository you forked from.

This can be useful if you're actively developing a project that was abandoned, as it makes it so default PRs are against your master instead of against the origin repository.

[abstract_put]

Even worse than that - you have to go into the "danger zone" on GitHub, and then there's a big banner that says "Warning: Potentially destructive operation" and also the gates you mentioned.

They bypassed numerous sanity checks and then clicked the button that did exactly what it told them it would do, and now they're sad.

Do stars on GitHub _do_ anything? Usually I'm a bit put off by any kind of internet point begging, but I'm curious what the impact of losing them is. Is it mostly a signal of "I like this"?

[errcorrectcode]

Discarding self-validation social media-ing, stars xlate into discoverability and ranking algo positions for the starred and bookmarks for the starrer.

[ReleaseCandidat]

> Is it mostly a signal of "I like this"?

It's a bookmark in theory (in 'Your stars'), but more or less just a 'like'.

[saleemkce]

This is useful.