If you fork on GitHub, they take care of letting people know.
I've forked a few abandondedish projects, and other people seem to find the patches. The best example I can think of is stud, which the people behind Varnish adopted and renamed to hitch; they surveyed the landscape and took good patches from most of the forks.
I might not look for forks from a more active project, but it's definitely something I look for when I run into problems with software without a lot of recent updates.
If you fork on GitHub, they take care of letting people know.
I've forked a few abandondedish projects, and other people seem to find the patches. The best example I can think of is stud, which the people behind Varnish adopted and renamed to hitch; they surveyed the landscape and took good patches from most of the forks.
I might not look for forks from a more active project, but it's definitely something I look for when I run into problems with software without a lot of recent updates.