The Watch, Star, and Fork buttons
You've probably spotted the three buttons sitting at the top-right corner of your repository page. These appear for every public repository, not only your own.
The Watch button manages the level of subscription in a repository. GitHub notifies you with an email whenever an action takes place in a repository you follow and, at the same time, it lists them in the Notifications area (https://github.com/notifications) where you can later mark them as read, as shown in the following screenshot:
There are three levels of subscription, ranging from "never be notified" to "Big Brother". You can choose to be notified only if you explicitly take part in a conversation or if someone mentions you (Not watching). This is the mid level of notification you can get, and is the default behavior when you create a new repository. The next level is to always be notified, for example, whenever a conversation begins, or a new issue is created, or someone leaves a comment in a line of code, or someone mentions you (Watching). Finally, the third option is to never be notified (Ignoring).
You can mention someone by prefixing their username with the at sign (@). This is the special way in which GitHub can understand that you need someone's attention. Start typing the username and GitHub will be smart enough to autocomplete it.
The Star button is a way to show your appreciation to a repository and its creator. It depicts the popularity of a project. Whenever you star a repository, it gets added to your list of starred repositories. You can see all your starred repositories at https://github.com/stars.
A list with the most starred projects on GitHub can be found at https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=stars%3A%3E1&type=Repositories.
You can see the people who have starred a repository by clicking the number next to the Star/Unstar button. For the repository I just created, you can see that I am the only stargazer:
The Fork button and its purpose is what made GitHub excel in the first place. As we will see later in this book, its main use is when you wants to contribute to a project. When you fork a repository, it gets copied in your own namespace, and that way you have full ownership of that copy; thus, you are able to modify anything you want. Go ahead and try it. Go to https://github.com/axilleas/github-essentials and press the Fork button. After a short while (depending on the size of the repository), you will be redirected to your own copy of this repository that you fully own.