Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 279 posts

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

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would hiring 100+ customer support reps be a problem for Microsoft?

1. They would need to be somewhat technical, so they would not be cheap. Let's say $70,000 a piece.

2. It is a free product. Would you spend 7 million a year supporting a free product?

3. 99% of complaints would be of the nature "GitHub is broken. HELP!" and really be some person who did not set the origin before pushing.

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

#53
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Regardless, a dozen is a good starting point.

I am not sure that would be better simply because they would either need to throw away a lot of tickets randomly or the wait times would be horrendous.

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

#54

Mistakes happen and hopefully this was just one of them. The alternative is slightly too difficult to bear.

That’s not a valid excuse for people who rely on these services professionally. The ability for companies to errantly and permanently ban people without any kind of due process is unacceptable. If we as a community truly care about OSS and the people behind it, this kind of error cannot be tolerated. It flies in the face of everything that the open source community stands for.

If someone maintains a project, wouldn't they have the code and be able to push it to another service (or run their own)?

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

#55

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?

Careful about leaping to conclusions, we're hearing one side of a story here.

While true, it is ageless problem that the faceless large corporation does not give a shit about any indivual user of their system

Time and time again we see large companies from all markets only respond when public interest is triggered and more than just the individual user starts to question the actions of the company

This is the sad reality we are in, if you tie your work, your income, etc to a large corporation you likely will be screwed at some point unless you can cause a public backlash.

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

#56

More proof that anyone that trusts a cloud service for absolutely mission critical infrastructure for a business like source control should reconsider. And I'm not saying this to attack OP in any way. But everyone should have a system to take backup of their org accounts on GitHub and other services if thats what you use. You don't want the apocalypse scenario that the service bans you and now you are all scrambling…

This doesn't make any sense. OPs problem isn't that he doesn't have backups of his repos (it is git, after all), it's that he doesn't have access to the social features of github: PR permissions, their patron service, etc.

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

#57
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.

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.

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

#58
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Regardless, a dozen is a good starting point.

They already have more than a dozen

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

#59

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 at GitHub reading this, this thread has motivated me to move the rest of my projects to a self-hosted solution.

Putting all my eggs in GitHub's basket is evidently too much risk for me to bear.

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

#60

While this issue might appear small, even a "mistake", and would probably be resolved to OP's satisfaction (wishing them all the best!), it truly is time for entrepreneurs to flock together and start building alternatives to Github.

I love GitHub. It's probably my favorite platform in general but I have to agree. I would love to see a new platform that is a non-profit or public benefit corp, perhaps with a government charter or something. Software is too important not to have this sort of public infrastructure to support it. Private companies can still innovate to create better tools but public investment in software infrastructure/tools is an amazing opportunity to leverage a relatively small amount of pooled resources into a much larger benefit to society.
Post reply on HN