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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

#181

Post by sreevisakh »

FactCore wrote: post #102
simonkafan wrote: post #68

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.

Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I don't think GitHub has a monopoly. Git was created to be decentralized, so every developer has a "backup" of sorts on their own machine. If GitHub is truely hostile to you, taking your business elsewhere (or hosting it yourself) shouldn't be too much of a roadblock for people with sponsors like OP.

GitHub and other forges are value added services on top of git. They wouldn't be this popular if it weren't for issue trackers and merge managers, CI and that sort of stuff. They are centralized and can't be migrated out once an account is locked. GitHub can be considered a monopoly because recruiters tend to neglect repos elsewhere. We really need decentralized/federated alternatives to that.

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

#182

Post by Silhouette »

MattGaiser wrote: post #52
catalogia wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

That is roughly the fully-loaded cost to employ a senior software developer in much of the world. A decent but first-line tech support agent would cost a fraction of that amount almost anywhere outside the US.

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

Presumably for the same reasons you spent far more than that to buy and continue to operate the service at all.

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.

Then 99% of the complaints will be dealt with quickly using standard replies and references to FAQs. These aren't going to be the ones attracting hundreds of comments and presumably thousands more readers on prominent online forums for software developers.

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

#183

Post by saagarjha »

gus_massa wrote: post #7
ygcodes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's 6 days ago!

For the lazy https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/commit/c6593b93e8d85a8cd3... It has five authors (one is a bot). The fourth one is the OP but the picture does not have a link to the profile because it is suspended.

TIL GitHub pulls out Co-authored-by: lines

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

#184

Post by Silhouette »

jlokier wrote: post #178
Silhouette wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't disagree, but I think it's fair to say that the risk of some random DNS-related dispute causing a problem where your registrar cuts you off is much lower than the risk of some random SAAS you depend on pulling a fast one.

The culture and economics behind a lot of tech SAASes that we talk about here all the time make them inherently vulnerable to discarding or abusing users, even those who have been with them a long time and maybe paid them quite a lot of money, in the name of the almighty growth curve. The incentives there are not necessarily aligned with supporting even long-standing and loyal users.

In contrast, there is little to gain for a DNS provider to screw a paying customer or get embroiled in some tedious arguments about rights to some domain name. They can't entirely avoid that because of the environment they operate in, but they are generally going to make the most money when they have lots of happy customers who can briefly engage with the provider's almost entirely automated systems and pay some registration fees for the privilege through another almost entirely automated system and then everyone can get on with their day happy with the trade.

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

#185

Post by dang »

opqpo wrote: post #32

All big tech companies have a liberal thought police right now. Reddit for example was a place of freedom until 4 years ago and now it's a "1984 as a service". Facebook doesn't even let you express anything except for sharing cute cat videos or ultra liberal views. I wonder if you posted anything that did upset their Gestapo knowingly or unknowingly because it doesn't matter. Maybe you used a variable than contained…

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We ban accounts that post like this and like your other comments downthread—regardless of which ideology or politics you favor. No more of this, please.

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

#186

Post by kemonocode »

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.

As many as it takes or is permissible, then.

The notion that customer support, just like security, is just a sunken cost needs to stop.

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

#187

Post by oefrha »

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #179
oefrha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I’m just an individual who was free for a few years, then started paying $7/mo (now $4/mo). Anyone can ask them to gc repos at any time. Typically needed when there’s an accidental push of a secret.

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

#188

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

shash7 wrote: post #98
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)

Problem is that there are so many services that integrate with github directly that moving to other alternatives will also require moving/replacing those 3rd party services.

Is it possible to self host the code, but then automate syncing backups to public Github.

That way you can use 3rd party integrations, and be part of the Github ecosystem 99% of the time, but when they do something like this, you have an emergency place to work from?

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

#189

Post by mako254 »

jacquesm wrote: post #125
pedrogpimenta wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but these kind of posts raise awareness of problems that affect many many people. I'm happy that this becomes public for the guy in question and for everyone of us.

You can see these on a daily basis by now. Just the other day, major Youtube channel blocked, Gsuite accounts suspended without warning (after a decade of forking over cash) and so on. The only warning you will ever need is this one: Don't trust the cloud, don't trust cloud providers and make sure your mission critical path is only tied to things that you can control or that you have a 'hot' spare standing by for. Ot…

You are absolutely right - you can't just handover a kill switch for your business to a megacorp. However, there are a lot of instances where alternatives are not viable because of the same megacorps. For example, email is a major online ID and being locked out of it can be disastrous even for an individual. Ideally, you would want an email server of your own - but then the 2 major email providers simply junk the mail from small servers even when they have good spam filter score. Similar story about search engines directing traffic to imposters. There are no reasons to believe that this is unintentional. This wouldn't be a problem if everyone else had the same priorities as you. What alternative do we have other than to loudly shame them where it matters and get as many people to off those platforms?

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

#190

Post by gus_massa »

bibinou wrote: post #145
minxomat wrote: post #132

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 OP changed his username in github less than a month ago to to the name of an inactive account? Perhaps the previous user is complaining.
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