true, I assumed that from the question, because otherwise it wouldn't be a fork in any way if the history has been deleted.

Even if the history is exactly the same, GitHub only tracks forks made through the fork button. A true git fork (eg anonymous clone, push to brand new repo, preserving all commit history) is not tracked.

... yes, that's what you already said?

Based on your comment I thought you only thought it applied when you deleted the history, just wanted to clarify.

I think he just means to create the repo like normal and push your fork there as opposed to creating a fork using the fork button.