I live in Austin, please don't do this. Not to mention our sidewalks aren't nearly as dirty as say LA, and it won't look as nice. A few years ago whrrrl put down a bunch of chalk on the sidewalks and never cleaned it up, it's still there and now it's just embarrassing. Graffiti is graffiti. Etching your name into dirt is still etching your name into something.
interesting idea, though in keeping away from feature bloat, wouldn't it be much much easier, and just as effective to put that information in the read me?
I realize the you said they don't want to but the info there, but why? If you really wanted to abandon the project why not just close the repo, which would shift all your traffic to another fork?
If github implemented this feature, I wouldn't be upset, but it seems very single purpose. Maybe a status flag, so the author can not just say "abandoned", but "up to date", or "active" though again, all of that can be seen through the commit history.
Next time one of your developers says that they think a feature is a bad idea because they "don't understand the use-case" make them do tech support for a week.
I like the service and just applied for an invite. The demo on the main page shows changing text can you also change css, swap images, or use different html elements?