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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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mostly support is a person getting a hold of someone that can escalate. No technical requirements needed.

No. Support is a pyramid where each node should try to solve the problems they can before an escalation.

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

#233
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.

There are two things you should ensure while self-hosting:

1. Always have independent and automatic data backup. A storage medium attached to a raspberry pi is plenty enough

2. Always choose a setup that you can deploy and migrate trivially

It wouldn't matter what the hosting provider does if you have the power to pack up your bags and move elsewhere when they misbehave.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it sounds bad from the description, the story is still very limited and missing the other side. However this is just vendor management. You have to balance risk and productivity, and it's even more important now with how many different services a typical business uses. Most people are better off using third-party services with proper support contracts rather than trying to plan for an edge case while ignoring a…

The 'other side' is irrelevant. If you run a service oriented organization and are gateway to a substantial fraction of the open source projects out there you should have your customer support house in order to the point where fora such as this one are not seen as a means of last resort.

The "other side" is completely relevant. We don't yet know if this is a policy issue, a tech issue, a legal issue, a national security issue, an account takeover / hacking, etc.

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

#235
post #168
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or just 2020/07/08, and avoid any confusion.

Or just use 2020-07-08 to avoid any confusion AND be ISO 8601 compliant.

Or just never bring this up again so you don't receive downvotes from people for simply pointing out a piece of information. Wow!

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another vector is takeover requests via their name squatting policy (that's how I got my username). But those requests shouldn't be approved unless the old account really is inactive. Might have been approved by mistake. Another vector is the as of yet unfixed GitHub "ghost" bug, which I discovered and detailed here: https://github.com/git-rest/spooky Note how you can read that repo, but the account https://github.co…

OP got his 2-letter handle via a takeover request: https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... edit: the ghost repo is cool trick. Is there a writeup anywhere?

The ghost repo trick sounds similar to a subdomain takeover. I can foresee this being a vector for publishing malicious code.

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

#237
post #227

It’s worth noting that the OP has recently acquired a 2-letter username from someone else & blogged about it: https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... I imagine there’s more to this than disclosed.

I read the article. What's fishy about this?

There's just a decent likelihood that in the past two weeks some sort of dispute has been made about this. Maybe the original owner contacted them, and they are trying to decide what to do about it?

If there's a dispute on something that I don't know how to resolve, just disabling it until I get advice from a supervisor sounds like a good strategy to me.

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

#238
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is realistic only if they're the only ones contributing to it, because otherwise they have to convince their other maintainers to use another platform. What if the other maintainers just fork the Github repo and keep going? Now the community has diverged purely because of corporate incompetence. And in the case of this particular developer, he lost sponsorship because he was locked out of his GitHub account. The…

> This is realistic only if they're the only ones contributing to it, because otherwise they have to convince their other maintainers to use another platform.

Thanks!

How do you know this was due to corporate incompetence?

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

#239
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do prioritize tickets that indicate an issue as complete blocker. Our team that monitors hackernews for feedback, issues, and criticisms work to make sure these things are actually being prioritized, as it’s not always clear from the support ticket how severe a blocker might be.

Is "my account is suspended, I don't know why" considered a "complete blocker"?

Yes, if the support ticket is opened when the issue is discovered. This particular instance was first reported on hackernews and was due to our dormant namespace policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23827772

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

#240
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At our shop we are happy using Github Enterprise. There may be something unstated in this page's story.

Is your happiness a happiness of never having a problem that needed a human to resolve or a happiness of having a problem and Github resolving it? One is an unknown and the other is an counterpoint to this.

> Is your happiness a happiness of never having a problem that needed a human to resolve or a happiness of having a problem and Github resolving it?

It's due to paying github and getting highly technical support. The tooling is also superior for our purposes.

I am not saying that everyone needs to pay github. There is a good chance, however, that there was a reason this person's account was suspended. If this was due to a mistake, a straightforward contact letter would have more results than starting an internet petition.

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