I’ve seen some projects on GitHub (howdy being one of them that came to mind) where there are forks, but when I check the forks out they are either unchanged, or are behind by a few commits. I was wondering why this would happen. It couldn’t be for archival purposes, could it?
OP is referring specifically to those who don’t contribute but fork anyway.
How could anyone possibly know that those people don’t contribute? Why would anyone even try finding that information?
you compare the number of forks with the number of contributors
forks are almost always higher
that is just people that got their commits in, it doesn’t mean that others didn’t try to contribute, but failed.