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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

#171
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American right has been trying to claim the Nazis were left-wing for a while now. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/05/right-need... Including in Congress: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/27/18283879/nazism-socialism-hitl...

I thought Social Services are considered left-wing

That'd be an overly simplistic way of categorizing things.

You won't find many right-wing candidates for office proposing removing Social Security and Medicare.

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it would, what else did you expect. Microsoft and open source have preciously little to do with each other regardless of how much lipstick they put on the pig. Selling Github to MS was a major mistake and one that we will all eventually end up regretting. This company is not friendly to open source unless it will find a way to milk it for profit, and even then only until that route is more profitable than a…

I had hoped that GitHub's culture, Nat Friedman as a CEO, and Microsoft's seeming acceptance of Open Source lately would combine to maybe prevent GitHub from turning into Microsoft SharePoint For Code. It seems that I may be wrong.

Nat might still hold the CEO title, but no longer has the power to set policy.

He should do as he is told by MS.

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

#173
post #166
post #126

Had a similar thing happen to me with Github a while back (pre-Microsoft acquisition). Even as a paying customer for many years, my account was disabled – without even receiving an email warning. I only discovered when browsing issue histories where I knew I'd left detailed comments, and noticing my comments gone without even a note about deletion, leaving threads nonsensically fragmented. When I tried to login, I wa…

Par for the course these days. And its getting worse. When you have 40 million users and a few hundred people running the system, all kinds of issues just sit in queues never seen by human eyes until a gigantic stink about it is raised.

For those in the EU/UK, it's worth noting that the GDPR isn't just about controlling how personal data is used. It also imposes obligations on data processors to take care of that data properly.

The usual issues arise about enforceability as long as this is only European law, and about ambiguity in the way the GDPR itself is written.

However, it seems likely that arbitrary deletion of personal data like this could fall foul of the requirements for integrity and availability, particularly given the GP was a paying customer.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had my account removed from Gitlab.com without warning and discovered it when my workflow broke. I'm talking to support but my issue has yet to be resolved.

Do you mind sharing your support ticket number here, or email it to community@gitlab.com? We can help escalate the issue internally. Thanks!

Can you do all your customers a favor and fix the process so that "I posted on HN/Twitter/whatever" is not a desirable means of escalation?

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

#175

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. B…

They are putting their business in the hands of a vendor they pay for a service.

When you pay a professional for a service, you should be able to expect that the service is provided.

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

#176
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair :-) I meant, nothing to do with Github's acquisition by Microsoft.

You'd be surprised how much an acquisition changes priorities. Suddenly the CEO of your company is a middle manager at the acquiring behemoth who is at the whims of their generous crop of Senior Vice Presidents, and wants to keep them happy because s/he has a ton of unvested stock on the line. I don't know what the precise cause of this bad support is, but I would wager that an acquisition by Microsoft will shift Git…

Just so you know how distant Microsoft is keeping this acquisition, Github employees don't show up on the default lookup tool (Who).

I'm sure they're pedalling Azure, but other than that Github is still very much independent.

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

#177

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.

Just back up the data somewhere else. No matter what you use, there's a possibility that your stuff will just vanish one day. Your own hard drives could die, your building could burn to the ground. Don't put your data into something that you can't get it back out of later. Off site backups are like sysadmin 101. You even need to back up your cloud infrastructure, it's not unheard of for any of the cloud providers to lose a whole bunch of VMs, storage, etc all at once. It's rare, but it does happen, just like an account lock-out.

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

#178
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At some point, there are risks you can't realistically control. There will always be extremely unlikely but theoretically possible catastrophic outcomes. Working DNS is great until global thermonuclear war or a supervolcano erupting renders the Internet rather irrelevant, for example. A sensible policy is to look at the risks you can do something about, try to assess how likely each threat is and what damage it would…

I think highlighting risks in systems we might eventually change, but can't change yet, is also part of sensible policy.

We're not going to change the DNS registrar system overnight. But by drawing attention to the issue, we might, eventually, make it a bit more robust with regards to things like registrars becoming unresponsive to small players, or losing data.

For example if people could register with two or three independent registrars in order to have robust control and ownership in the event any one registrar fails them, that might help as a technical solution for robustness. No doubt there are other non-technical things that may help as well.

Separate from changing DNS, I think it's sensible to recognise that risks with cloud hosting or using SaaS, as happened to OP with their GitHub account, also exist with DNS, so for anyone who would find that a problem, they should evaluate whether relying on a single domain, or even on DNS itself, is the right thing to do. For example, high-value IoT devices in the field that can't be updated easily might look for their server at more than one DNS name, and specifically on separate domains (not subdomains) held by distinct registrars, and validate the server's identity. Or they might keep track of IP addresses that have worked recently (in addition to DNS) and fall back to those. (I have worked on devices where this was helpful because DNS on some deployed sites turned out to be unreliable.)

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

#179
post #96

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?

This seems weird because I’ve contacted GitHub Support dozens of times over a good part of the last decade and they’ve always been pretty responsive. Need to gc a repo? Usually done within the hour. Make a fork standalone? Same. UI complaints and suggestions? At least get a human response within a day or so, either explaining a decision or saying the feedback has been filed. I guess abuse-related tickets can’t be han…

If you are need to gc repos it is likely you are a huge customer that they care about.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, most small startups, especially successful ones, rely on SaaS for as much as possible. The goal is to do as little as possible themselves.

SaaS is cutting corners, plain and simple. Yes, in a startup you need to cut corners, but it will bite you in the ass eventually.

Everything will bite you in the ass eventually. Nothing is ideal. Everything has risks and eventual failure modes. Good business is about managing those risks rather than eliminating them.
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