Because many organizations are looking for developers and Github is one of the main sources of information. It's really important to hide old projects and just show what is more revelant. In this way you will be presenting only the best of your work.
How?
Create a new organization for projects that you no longer want to maintain. Move all your old repos to this new organization. Using this method all old links are redirected to the new location and all the old info is preserved across pull requests, issues, etc.
Put something like [UNMAINTAINED] to the description of the project. Optionally put the badge http://unmaintained.tech/ in the README.
Other Tips
Create an Organization for storing your experiments. Many times one just want to try new things and experiment. If the project deserves to be in your personal github then you can move it later.
Use these patterns for organization names. {name}-archive for old unmaintained repos. {name}-experiments for things that are being made or not ready to be in you profile. (replace {name} with the organization name).
Gitlab?
Gitlab can be used and it's more flexible with the Group and Subgroup feature. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/index.html. But Github is more often used by recruiters.
Top comments (6)
Thanks. Good Insight. Projects are like cleaning the house. Sometimes it's better to wipe the dust out for having a blank slate and focus on the important projects.
Another strategy: I keep some things in private repos. It costs $7 per month for this capability, but to me it's worth it.
A repo can be moved freely between private and public.
Thanks for your reply. Yes you can put repos in private. The problem is that if your projects are open source and have some users or forks the people would not be able to look in the original repo, also it will be clutter only visible to you :).
This is what I've been doing so far, as well. Though, after reading this post I think I'm gonna try this organization method for a couple of older unmaintained projects.
Also, many people don't know that students can receive free access to unlimited private repos while in school with the Studennt Developer Pack.
No money for private repositories. 😀😀
I use gitlab.. 😇
Thanks for the post. I'll move some experimental repos