You can find the forks by looking in the "network" part of the UI.
I do agree that GitHub could do more to highlight forks and their relationship to one another. But I don't think the current way - having an open pull request - is the only way to do that.
As a former maintainer, I am very in favor of this move. After having spent 10 years or so being hounded with "Any update on this?" and "Can we get this merged?", I don't think I would ever do it again as long as there aren't controls in place to be able to set the expectation that the code is free to do with as you will, and please go ahead and fork if you want it to do something different.
Is there a way I can tell why the forks were created, like the PR description? Even if there was, I would still want to see comments/discussions both from maintainers and the community so I know i'm not applying some shady patch.
I think you and others on this thread have the problem of not being able to ignore people. But that's your problem entirely. If you want a feature to silence PR notifications, by all means, I have no problem with that. You're taking out your notification annoyance by taking away a critical feature from your users. That's just petty and mean in my opinion.
Heck, does your email client not have the feature to auto-sort emails to junk/deleted? Is there any frustration you have beyond that?
I do agree that GitHub could do more to highlight forks and their relationship to one another. But I don't think the current way - having an open pull request - is the only way to do that.
As a former maintainer, I am very in favor of this move. After having spent 10 years or so being hounded with "Any update on this?" and "Can we get this merged?", I don't think I would ever do it again as long as there aren't controls in place to be able to set the expectation that the code is free to do with as you will, and please go ahead and fork if you want it to do something different.