Why wouldn't github count forks? I have several repos forked with my own local changes. (I also have some repos forked without changes.) They should absolutely count forks with commits on them at the very least.
Internally all forks are stored in the original repository. So it would be reasonable to expect Github to just count the number of repositories that exists.
are you sure? how does that work? how does git clone know to only give me my fork and not the whole repository? to my understanding they must be full copies. they can use hardlinks to avoid duplicating files to save space.
