The first thing I check when evaluating a Github project is the commit history. In my opinion, it gives me the best overall impression of the quality the code and the health of the whole project/community. Specifically I'm looking for:
What has been changed recently? Lots of features with no commits for bug fixes indicate a project early in its life. Are there lots of merge commits, but few "normal" commits? This could indicate the project is mature and feature-complete, and very stable. As long as there are recent commits, even if they are mostly community-contributed, means it is still actively maintained.
When was the last commit made? And when was the last commit before that? I typically consider repos as no longer maintained if they haven't been updated in a more than a year, or if they have been updated less than once a month for over a year (not necessarily one commit per month, but infrequent "spurts" of activity with no consistency).
Who is contributing to the project? For projects with fewer stars I would expect just one or two committers, but projects with lots of stars and few recent contributors may indicate the project is dying.
The first thing I check when evaluating a Github project is the commit history. In my opinion, it gives me the best overall impression of the quality the code and the health of the whole project/community. Specifically I'm looking for:
That seems like a very good and thorough approach 👍🏼