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Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

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Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#61

Post by ISL »

MattGaiser wrote: post #35
giancarlostoro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a common problem around the tech industry as a whole. What would it really cost them to have even just half a dozen decent people running around doing support. I am sure they will be busy very quick too but it will help to maintain GitHub as a community focused site that aims to keep you productive after all git is a productivity enhancement utility.

The problem is that you wouldn't need a dozen but rather 100+. Support doesn't scale well.

It should at worst scale linearly with user-count and hence, at least in the asymptotic limit, revenue.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#62

Post by sheogorath »

eropple wrote: post #31
sheogorath wrote: post #18

I'm sorry to break it to you. But that's basically want you agreed to by accepting their terms of service: "GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time." https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-te…

This is unhelpful. In a practical way, if you want to participate in open-source you very often must use GitHub. It is also unhelpful because it conflates what GitHub is legally allowed to do with what they should do . "They gave consent" is a poor basis for bad behavior and it cannot be normalized with a sniff and a "well, read the TOS".

Agreed, not super helpful his current situation. But might something that other people who read this want to take into consideration or being aware of. And hopefully being more critical about terms of service in future.

For him, I would expect to call out the clause that "allows" GitHub to do that as it is quite sure illegal in some European counties to have such a arbitrary termination policy. And maybe even start a legal case about it and call for support.

But this way it simply sounds like "please take me back" begging.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#64

Post by ISL »

azangru wrote: post #49
kylebenzle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've avoided MSFT like the plague for 5 years. When they bought LinkedIn, deleted account. When they bought GitHub, stated using BitBucket. Same with Google. When they went to the dark side I moved to FastMail and DDG. Long story short: don't give your time and money to evil corporations.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Microsoft owns GitHub, so any GitHub problem is, ultimately, Microsoft's problem.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#65

Post by throwaway43234 »

ISL wrote: post #61
MattGaiser wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you wouldn't need a dozen but rather 100+. Support doesn't scale well.

It should at worst scale linearly with user-count and hence, at least in the asymptotic limit, revenue.

Users can be free or paid. When I open up support tickets backed by a paid account they're always very quickly resolved. I'm not sure how much GitHub needs to support people who won't even pay for the product...

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#66

Post by richardwhiuk »

ISL wrote: post #61
MattGaiser wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you wouldn't need a dozen but rather 100+. Support doesn't scale well.

It should at worst scale linearly with user-count and hence, at least in the asymptotic limit, revenue.

I'm not convinced revenue on services with free plans scales linearly with users.

It's unclear if the poster had a paid for account.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#67

Post by finnthehuman »

zomglings wrote: post #13

It is ridiculous that GitHub has not even responded to your support ticket. To anyone reading from GitHub, this is making me rethink my choice of GitHub as a platform, and I'm sure the same is true for other people reading this post. Your reputation is very much at stake. To anyone reading this from Gitlab, how easy is it to migrate CI/CD off of GitHub Actions to Gitlab?

>To anyone reading from GitHub, this is making me rethink my choice of GitHub as a platform

You should reconsider it no matter what; you're putting your business in someone else's hands and relying on their goodwill not to completely fuck you over.

Using Github can be a tolerable risk when your company has hundreds of more-likely reasons to fail in the next month and needs every little bit of saved time it can get. But once the business has it's feet under itself, the github contract of adhesion is a pretty stupid risk to take.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#68

Post by simonkafan »

In Austria there is a law in place saying if a company has a monopoly (e.g. public transport) or a quasi-monopoly (e.g. only supermarket in a 100 miles radius) the company is required to serve any customer and is not allowed to turn any down.

It is time that all countries introduce laws that prohibit online monopolies from denying access to their users without good reasons.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#69

Post by kps »

varispeed wrote: post #47
Hamcha wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you truly wish to avoid this kind of problems you should think about hosting your own platform rather than jumping to the next one. Just because the smaller players haven't done anything bad doesn't mean they wouldn't. Gitea/Gitlab are crazy easy to set-up nowadays, especially with a fully working CI/CD setup (I use Gitea+Drone and I love it, Gitlab comes with its own)

You are essentially shifting the problem from entity to entity and from one domain to another. If you self host your repository, your hosting provider can pull the plug and you essentially end up in square one. If you decide to self host, you should consider multi-cloud cross continent and cross political doctrine cluster.

You don't need a hosting provider. Your code fits on each developers' machine. (Remember when git was touted as a distributed version control system?) If it doesn't, you're at the scale where you're not worrying about your hosting provider dropping you — they're worried about you dropping them.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#70

Post by jlokier »

PinguTS wrote: post #57
varispeed wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are essentially shifting the problem from entity to entity and from one domain to another. If you self host your repository, your hosting provider can pull the plug and you essentially end up in square one. If you decide to self host, you should consider multi-cloud cross continent and cross political doctrine cluster.

Moving your own self-hosted stuff around different hosting providers is easy and doesn't interrupt the service, at least not for long. Just open an account at a new hosting provider. Fire up, your backup, changing DNS and you are up and running.

This is great until your DNS account is blocked at the registrar for similarly opaque reasons.
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