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Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

657 points by ygcodes 6y ago

Hello friends, I'm a Full Stack Developer from India. I'm a maintainer at Gatsby, Open Sauced and Triager at ExpressJS, Nest.land, JSHttp etc. I use GitHub a lot, but recently my account got suspended midnight without any notice, From my knowledge I haven't spammed GitHub, I review 3 - 6 PRs in Gatsby per day, It's been a week without GitHub, I have three sponsors in GitHub, they are asking me tons of questions and one of my sponsor stopped sponsoring me (my payout balance got reduced). All of my office work got stopped, I'm the admin of the org that is used in our company. All employees now don't have access to the repo because it is returning 404. I got support from lot of people in Twitter but GitHub is not responding to my ticket for a week. I also created a petition is change.org https://www.change.org/p/github-inc-my-github-account-suspended-for-no-reason https://www.change.org/p/github-inc-my-github-account-suspen... some people supported me over there too. It would be great if GitHub unsuspends me. My support ticket number: 763327 GitHub Profile: https://github.com/yg https://github.com/yg Save Open source developers! Hope Nat Friedman and GitHub will see this!

grumpy-cowboy 6y ago
My client use paid GitHub services for the new projects they work on. But we (devs) really hate it because it slow us at lot (can't push/pull, Github Actions not working, "crash" our CI/CD server, ...) because of instability of Github servers! Their status page look like a Christmas Tree! Not a single week without issues. I don't have control on my client decisions (not my business), but personally I'm done with GH.
rvz 6y ago
> Save Open source developers! You do not need GitHub for this. Just self-host on a GitLab or Gitea instance to avoid this nonsense of destroyed logins and account suspensions.
LockAndLol 6y ago
We really need ForgeFed and federated source hosting platforms
deleted 6y ago
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villgax 6y ago
https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i12 https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... You probably abused API limits searching for your two letter username
StevePlea 6y ago
Had a similar thing happen to me. I once travelled to Cuba and checked GitHub one. My account was suspended but with some complaining it was quickly restored after they needed real proof of me.
paride5745 6y ago
I was still on the fence between staying on Github or moving to Gitlab. All the bad experiences I'm reading in the comments helped me realize it's time to move to Gitlab. Too bad my company still doesn't want to migrate (too many integrations with Github sadly), even considering all the downtimes in the past few months which have impacted us significantly.
FelipeAraujo88 6y ago
My gosh, that's watch happened. and I was thinking about some fail in server.
JRodDynamite 6y ago
I faced the same issue. Had to raise a ticket and GitHub basically reopened it after some duration (can't remember how long). The deactivation was due to an automated script apparently.
pragnesh 6y ago
https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i12 https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... possible reason ?
onetom 6y ago
Many commenters were so focused on offerring some git repo hosting alternatives, while it was clearly stated in the post that @yg's main use-case was PR review. What would you recommend to replace that feature? https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/ doesn't say much about PRs/Issues unfortunately, but I found this GH-issue which suggest the Gitea do have a review system since 2018 autumn, which seems to be on par with Github's interface: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/3748 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/3748 Can anyone confirm this, who used both Github and Gitea PR review features?
jayp1418 6y ago
Always host company backup local repo in case of emergencies also look at https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/
gus_massa 6y ago
This is not a "Show HN:", please change the title to "Ask HN:" Which is your latest commit in https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/commits/master https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/commits/master ? (Is this the correct project?)
- ygcodes 6y ago
  "Thanks! changed to Ask HN" I mostly review PRs in Gatsby, I don't remember what is the last commit!
- qu4k 6y ago
  c6593b93e8d85a8cd3d2ead3fa05b9b37f362e18 this was his last commit
  - ygcodes 6y ago
    Yes it's 6 days ago!
    - gus_massa 6y ago
      For the lazy https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/commit/c6593b93e8d85a8cd3d2ead3fa05b9b37f362e18 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.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        TIL GitHub pulls out Co-authored-by: lines
hellossx 6y ago
wtf Github.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
agustif 6y ago
Wow, that's an awful way of getting de-platformed
marcinzm 6y ago
That's pretty bad, something for startups to keep in mind if they plan to use Github for their company I guess.
- IncRnd 6y ago
  At our shop we are happy using Github Enterprise. There may be something unstated in this page's story.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    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.
    - IncRnd 6y ago
      > 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.
- mobilio 6y ago
  Most of startups knows that if they need to succeed it must be self-hosted somewhere. I'm not talking just for sources and repos. About servers too.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    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.
thinkingkong 6y ago
Mistakes happen and hopefully this was just one of them. The alternative is slightly too difficult to bear.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  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.
  - IncRnd 6y ago
    If someone maintains a project, wouldn't they have the code and be able to push it to another service (or run their own)?
    - save_ferris 6y ago
      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 problem with Github is that everyone uses it, and services like Gitlab still don't have the same level of activity in the open source community. Well over 95% of source code links posted here on HN, for example, are Github links.
      - IncRnd 6y ago
        > 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?
marvindanig 6y ago
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.
- thayne 6y ago
  There are alternatives to GitHub. Gitlab, bitbucket, and sourcehut, just to name a few.
- ianwalter 6y ago
  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.
  - slathrop 6y ago
    There have been attempts at decentralization of git storage and collaboration. See for example: https://cointelegraph.com/news/interview_yurii_rashkovskii_the_creator_of_gitchain_the_unholy_offspring_of_github_and_bitcoin https://cointelegraph.com/news/interview_yurii_rashkovskii_t... I would love to see something like this succeed for all manner of infrastructure... from domains and DNS, to email, to version control.
zomglings 6y ago
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?
- account42 6y ago
  I am still looking for a good self-hosted solution for code hosting and bug tracking that - Doesn't have excessive server side dependencies or resource requirements - Doesn't have unnecessary client-side requirements (should be fully usable without JS, should not load a million resources to render a single page) - Doesn't make any external requests (except for things like third-party logins where there is no other way) - Has decent UX and visuals
- gtirloni 6y ago
  I think you should be first asking how easy is it to get free support from GitLab.
  - zomglings 6y ago
    We may find out very soon. If this blows up (and it really should), Gitlab may pull a move similar to their automatic migration utility from when Microsoft acquired GitHub.
  - ViViDboarder 6y ago
    For GitLab.com maybe that’s a question, but nobody is going to ban me from my self-hosted service.
    - flak48 6y ago
      Don't mean to sound facetious, but isn't self hosting also technically hosting somewhere ? (Unless you mean actually having access to the physical server where it's running from) In other words are we just assuming Digital Ocean/Hetzner or wherever one 'self-hosts' is less likely to auto ban you for no reason? I would say yes, but I hope others are atleast considering this aspect when comparing this moving to Gitlab or whatever
jtolds 6y ago
Incidentally, what terrible GitHub support that the best way to resolve this is to get help from Twitter or front page here.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  This is true of far too many major platforms. The only way to get resolution is to yell as loudly as you can on social media or forums and hope it goes viral. Truly terrifying how integral the internet has become and yet due process is nowhere to be found.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    I was blocked from my bank account for a week, with my outgoing rent stuck in it. Support (chat only) was mostly unavailable and would disappear before answering, or ask me for things at times I was asleep and be gone when I woke, or send me around in circles. After some research I picked up that their Facebook team was much better than customer services. So I DM'd someone in the bank's Facebook team, and my account was unblocked within 20 minutes.
  - erk__ 6y ago
    It has not been possible for me to access my paypalæ account for months. Had a hastely phonenumber change and then all their non-login support lines shut down because of covid. Which have led to me not having any access, as I need a sms to log in.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    And this is wrong. Platform support should stay within the platform. If you are unable to support your users get out of the platform businesses.
smoothgrammer 6y ago
Always do a periodic full off-site cold backup of all your GitHub repos. It's very easy to script and should compress down very small.
- the_svd_doctor 6y ago
  Is there an easy way to do that ? Some script available somewhere ?
  - blocked_again 6y ago
    You can write a simple GitHub action that pushes your repo to GitLab/BitBucket etc every 30 minutes or something.
    - gitgud 6y ago
      Probably better to have the action run on every push to master, no point running it every 30 mins if it hasn't been updated in months...
    - rajesh-s 6y ago
      Do you know an example of this?
      - hundchenkatze 6y ago
        Here's one I found on the Actions marketplace. https://github.com/marketplace/actions/mirroring-repository https://github.com/marketplace/actions/mirroring-repository
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    What I do is run Gitolite in a cheap VPS and then use https://github.com/miracle2k/gitolite-simple-mirror https://github.com/miracle2k/gitolite-simple-mirror to automatically mirror the gitolite repositories to github and gitlab.
  - sergiotapia 6y ago
sheogorath 6y ago
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-terms-of-service#l-cancellation-and-termination https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o... People, please read and question terms of online services.
- jtolds 6y ago
  > A common moral flaw I see in individualist cultures is thinking that "they gave consent" is a good reason to intentionally do something harmful to someone. https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1283038543577788417 https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1283038543577788417
  - sheogorath 6y ago
    Well, I would like to point out that the right move here would be to call out this clause in the terms of service. One could even try to take legal action in some countries that have civil right measures against such clauses. But no, instead one runs around and starts a petition.
    - TallGuyShort 6y ago
      Yeah, go ahead and call out that clause. I bet that will do more than the petition.
- TallGuyShort 6y ago
  He's not taking legal action, he's shedding light on a real dick move with a shitty response from support. He's also allowed to do that.
- eropple 6y ago
  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".
opqpo 6y ago
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 the word "blacklist"? Maybe it was a mistake, maybe you did something wrong. But maybe you've been neutralized by the silicon valley thought police.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > Facebook doesn't even let you express anything except for ... ultra liberal views. This is absurdly counter-factual.
  - opqpo 6y ago
    Just because you can't kill every opinion you don't like and depose every president you don't like and fire every employee who doesn't share your views and close every account on every website that has any different opinion, just like you flagged me doesn't mean it's counter-factual. You liberal extremists the plague of our generation.
    - BillSaysThis 6y ago
      If your assertion were true I wouldn't have needed to block long time friends who continually post opinions such as yours.
      - opqpo 6y ago
        Yes, you're so right to the point that I can't keep a post without being flagged within the first couple of minutes because HN is filled with liberal SS thugs like you.
        nindalf 6y ago
deadmik3 6y ago
Wait you can get sponsors on github?
- ygcodes 6y ago
  Yes I got 3 sponsors!
- mdaniel 6y ago
  I can see why you couldn't find it: their new help search is incredibly bad https://docs.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-community-with-github-sponsors/receiving-sponsorships-through-github-sponsors https://docs.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source...
mikikikik 6y ago
used wayback machine to dig up the most starred projects with their short descriptions. it seems the user has a couple slightly popular projects (10 to 200 stars) about gist and open source contribution tracking. so i think it's most likely a hacked account, given the interest in (extremely) short account names. the fact that they banned it without any message is disturbing. i hope to see what happens to this in a longer time period.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
If you’re doing anything mission critical on GitHub (or even if you aren’t), I highly recommend hosting your own Gitea or GitLab server and, at the very least, use it to mirror to or from your Github repos. Gitea is very lightweight and simple to manage. I use mine as my primary server for personal projects and mirror them to my GitHub account for the network effect. I also have my server mirroring several upstream projects from GitHub to run my Drone build server against, but it also makes sure I can access them should anything happen to the upstream or to my account.
delfinom 6y ago
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 to find the latest copies on your PCs.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  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.
fareesh 6y ago
Probably something to do with this? Mistaken identity maybe https://dev.to/lucis/how-i-got-the-github-username-of-my-dreams-5db5 https://dev.to/lucis/how-i-got-the-github-username-of-my-dre...
- harwoodr 6y ago
  Or even this one... https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i12 https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... Perhaps someone is trolling him as a result...
  - robaato 6y ago
    How times change - comment from OP: https://dev.to/yg/comment/11cog https://dev.to/yg/comment/11cog That's awesome! Agreed they have the best support team I ever have seen!
simonkafan 6y ago
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.
- d0100 6y ago
  Cue the "it's not a monopoly" crowd. I think we need another word for these companies that are way to big and "monopolize" certain online spaces/communities.
  - hundchenkatze 6y ago
    I am in the "it's not a monopoly" crowd and yes we should definitely use other words to describe companies that do not have exclusive control over a commercial activity.
    - theandrewbailey 6y ago
      Exclusive control of an activity isn't needed to be a monopoly. In the 90s, people used Netscape on Macs, but Microsoft got declared a monopoly anyway.
      - hundchenkatze 6y ago
        First I don't think your Netscape on Mac argument holds up. The antitrust suit was about IE on Windows. "[...] the U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the PC market primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java." [0] "The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft had abused monopoly power on Intel-based personal computers in its handling of operating system and web browser integration. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Windows operating system. Bundling them is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of IE." [0] I do agree that exclusive control may not be needed. However, Microsoft was engaging in other anti-competitive behavior. It's not like they're restricting Windows users to only use GitHub. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
babuloseo 6y ago
Woah, this is pretty high profile. Github has been having lots of issues recently. Honestly guys, this started happening ever since they did those new UI changes.
mariopt 6y ago
I've seen similar stuff happening when trying to block spammers. I worked for a major publishing company and we had an issue with the comments, too many spammers. After a review it has easy to see that 90% of the ip address came from India, blocking India was an easy fix although it is unfair for good citizens. Google your office IP address, maybe it got listed on some spam forum and GitHub and others used it. Given you have sponsors, this is a pretty big mistake on their behalf. Probably just a mistake, hope they restore your account.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bibinou 6y ago
Hi Yogi, I'm guessing your Github account has been hijacked. Support won't respond to your emails because it could be the attacker impersonating you, or he could still have access to your email and get info that way. This is Standard Operating Procedure I've seen applied on stolen accounts in MMO videogames involving stolen credit cards and organized crime. Sometimes wait time was 6 months with no contact, because they needed to keep the evidence under seal for the police investigation and avoid tipping off the attackers. Your 2-letter nickname and access to important projects makes your account a high-value target. Did you have 2FA enabled? edit: usually the email account got hijacked first, defeating the 2FA/1-time token. SMS is also easily hackable.
- ygcodes 6y ago
  Yes I have 2FA and MFA enabled!
  - minxomat 6y ago
    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 https://github.com/git-rest/spooky Note how you can read that repo, but the account https://github.com/git-rest https://github.com/git-rest doesn't exist.
    - bibinou 6y ago
      OP got his 2-letter handle via a takeover request: https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i12 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?
      - gus_massa 6y ago
        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.
wayneftw 6y ago
Your change.org petition says 08/07/2020 which hasn't happened yet. Not in the USA at least :) You should probably change that to 07/08/2020 if you're targeting American audiences.
- goneri 6y ago
  or just 2020/07/08, and avoid any confusion.
  - cywick 6y ago
    Or just use 2020-07-08 to avoid any confusion AND be ISO 8601 compliant.
    - wayneftw 6y ago
      Or just never bring this up again so you don't receive downvotes from people for simply pointing out a piece of information. Wow!
jacquesm 6y ago
HN is NOT a support channel for Github, Apple, Microsoft, Paypal, Google and a 100 other services out there that have piss-poor customer support. If the only way to get a rise out of these companies is to abuse HN then that should be indication enough whether or not you should route a critical part of your business through them.
- pedrogpimenta 6y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    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. Otherwise sooner or later you will be bitten.
    - mako254 6y ago
      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?
gojomo 6y ago
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 was only faced with a generic "activity that looked malicious" message – but no hint of what that might have been. Once I complained, I was restored quickly – but if I'd been on extended vacation, or perhaps even passed away, there'd have remained giant holes, indefinitely, in projects I'd contributed to. Was anything I legitimately did as myself suspect? (They couldn't say.) Was some third party trying to get access – or did they even briefly succeed, perhaps with some compromised credential somewhere? (That was my fear – but they couldn't say & there was no evidence of compromise in what I could see.) After several angry emails about how they shouldn't accuse a longtime paying account in good standing of 'malicious activity' – creating fear of an account compromise of unknown extent – they finally said no, it wasn't unauthorized access (or attempts thereof) but some comment (unspecified in age/topic) that a filter deemed similar to other malicious comments. I'd paid them ~$600 over the previous 5 years, and still had an active subscription with working billing details. My account was nearly a decade old with a wide variety of contributions & comments. But still, an automated system with no apparent human review disappeared my account, without even generating a notification.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- op03 6y ago
  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.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    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.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
Outsourcing source control/repositories for software dev. is a suicidal idea and it has always puzzled me that so many devs jumped onto the Github (and friends) bandwagon.
- sreevisakh 6y ago
  Where else do you host where you can easily attract potential contributors, sponsors and recruiters? Self hosting is not a solution since everyone would have to maintain separate accounts on all those instances. The discoverability is also poor. Git's decentralization is a wasted opportunity if discoverability and participation aren't equally decentralized. On a related note, I like sourcehut's design. I am not completely familiar with it, but I don't think you need an account at all to contribute.
patrickaljord 6y ago
Hope you get your account back soon.
benjaminwootton 6y ago
I also got my account locked when I changed my telephone number and had the email address associated with an old work email. They didn’t seem to be able to unlock it, so I lost a decade worth of projects. I now keep offline backups.
rurban 6y ago
Could have been one if those Indian judges, who flagged it. They are on quite a ride recently.
kuon 6y ago
I think this is the little push I needed to move to my own gita instance. Thank you for sharing, and I wish you the best resolution possible.
clairegraham 6y ago
I had the same thing happen last year, after the Microsoft acquisition. I was migrating my repos to a new github account and it was automatically suspended. No email notice or anything. I guess they saw two different accounts logged in at the same IP and that was enough to trigger it. I contacted them and explained what I was doing and they reinstated it, but I always thought Github allowed and even encouraged "machine users" and thus multiple accounts. I was definitely annoyed with their heavy-handed approach and lost trust; they could have emailed me first and given me a warning before just automatically shutting my account down and restricting access, assuming I'm a bad actor.
njsubedi 6y ago
Whoa! I was talking about the horror stories of losing GitHub account in a several of my latest comments/threads and I get to see another one. Why wouldn't they send out a notice, at least, before deactivating an old, active account?
- thephyber 6y ago
  > Why wouldn't they send out a notice If it was an account takeover, the malicious user would have changed the email address on account.
  - njsubedi 6y ago
    They could send out a notice to old email when they see a recent email change. When people change their email address in a service, that doesn't mean the old, verified email is completely useless.
sidhanthp 6y ago
The same thing happened to my Mom's Facebook account. She's a realtor that used Facebook extensively to stay in contact with her clients, as well as advertise for new business. One day, the account disappeared for malicious activity. PS: if anyone sees this and can help, shoot me a DM on Twitter :)
YooLi 6y ago
I had my username (three letters, my initials) taken and replaced with initials + underscore + number (xxx_123). No comment from GH or even alert they were changing it. I guess someone with friends at GH decided they wanted it. What can you do...
- notdang 6y ago
  that's almost what the author did here, they found an "unused" github handle that they liked: "yg" and wrote to support to claim it. No need to have friends at GH. https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i12 https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1...
trollied 6y ago
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-i12 https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... I imagine there’s more to this than disclosed.
- thisisweird 6y ago
  Might be this. https://dev.to/mscccc/hi-im-mike-coutermarsh https://dev.to/mscccc/hi-im-mike-coutermarsh See the comment. This intro post was old but OP’s comment was recent. That guy is a Github Staff. I am not sure though.
- elcomet 6y ago
  Btw, we can see a funny comment by the author in this article > Agreed they have the best support team I ever have seen!
- Yhippa 6y ago
  I read the article. What's fishy about this?
  - jldugger 6y ago
    That article was posted 10 days ago, on a US public holiday. Seems likely the previous owner only recently reported an account "theft" enabled by github's own support team and name reuse policy. This is exactly why account name reuse is such a bad idea.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    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.

657 points by ygcodes 6y ago

grumpy-cowboy 6y ago

My client use paid GitHub services for the new projects they work on. But we (devs) really hate it because it slow us at lot (can't push/pull, Github Actions not working, "crash" our CI/CD server, ...) because of instability of Github servers! Their status page look like a Christmas Tree! Not a single week without issues. I don't have control on my client decisions (not my business), but personally I'm done with GH.

rvz 6y ago

> Save Open source developers! You do not need GitHub for this. Just self-host on a GitLab or Gitea instance to avoid this nonsense of destroyed logins and account suspensions.

LockAndLol 6y ago

We really need ForgeFed and federated source hosting platforms

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

villgax 6y ago

https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i12 https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... You probably abused API limits searching for your two letter username

StevePlea 6y ago

Had a similar thing happen to me. I once travelled to Cuba and checked GitHub one. My account was suspended but with some complaining it was quickly restored after they needed real proof of me.

paride5745 6y ago

I was still on the fence between staying on Github or moving to Gitlab. All the bad experiences I'm reading in the comments helped me realize it's time to move to Gitlab. Too bad my company still doesn't want to migrate (too many integrations with Github sadly), even considering all the downtimes in the past few months which have impacted us significantly.

FelipeAraujo88 6y ago

My gosh, that's watch happened. and I was thinking about some fail in server.

JRodDynamite 6y ago

I faced the same issue. Had to raise a ticket and GitHub basically reopened it after some duration (can't remember how long). The deactivation was due to an automated script apparently.

pragnesh 6y ago

https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i12 https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... possible reason ?

onetom 6y ago

Many commenters were so focused on offerring some git repo hosting alternatives, while it was clearly stated in the post that @yg's main use-case was PR review. What would you recommend to replace that feature? https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/ doesn't say much about PRs/Issues unfortunately, but I found this GH-issue which suggest the Gitea do have a review system since 2018 autumn, which seems to be on par with Github's interface: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/3748 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/3748 Can anyone confirm this, who used both Github and Gitea PR review features?

jayp1418 6y ago

Always host company backup local repo in case of emergencies also look at https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/

gus_massa 6y ago

This is not a "Show HN:", please change the title to "Ask HN:" Which is your latest commit in https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/commits/master https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/commits/master ? (Is this the correct project?)

ygcodes 6y ago
"Thanks! changed to Ask HN" I mostly review PRs in Gatsby, I don't remember what is the last commit!
qu4k 6y ago
c6593b93e8d85a8cd3d2ead3fa05b9b37f362e18 this was his last commit
- ygcodes 6y ago
  Yes it's 6 days ago!
  - gus_massa 6y ago
    For the lazy https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/commit/c6593b93e8d85a8cd3d2ead3fa05b9b37f362e18 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.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      TIL GitHub pulls out Co-authored-by: lines

hellossx 6y ago

wtf Github.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

agustif 6y ago

Wow, that's an awful way of getting de-platformed

marcinzm 6y ago

That's pretty bad, something for startups to keep in mind if they plan to use Github for their company I guess.

IncRnd 6y ago
At our shop we are happy using Github Enterprise. There may be something unstated in this page's story.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  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.
  - IncRnd 6y ago
    > 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.
mobilio 6y ago
Most of startups knows that if they need to succeed it must be self-hosted somewhere. I'm not talking just for sources and repos. About servers too.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  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.

thinkingkong 6y ago

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

save_ferris 6y ago
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.
- IncRnd 6y ago
  If someone maintains a project, wouldn't they have the code and be able to push it to another service (or run their own)?
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    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 problem with Github is that everyone uses it, and services like Gitlab still don't have the same level of activity in the open source community. Well over 95% of source code links posted here on HN, for example, are Github links.
    - IncRnd 6y ago
      > 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?

marvindanig 6y ago

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.

thayne 6y ago
There are alternatives to GitHub. Gitlab, bitbucket, and sourcehut, just to name a few.
ianwalter 6y ago
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.
- slathrop 6y ago
  There have been attempts at decentralization of git storage and collaboration. See for example: https://cointelegraph.com/news/interview_yurii_rashkovskii_the_creator_of_gitchain_the_unholy_offspring_of_github_and_bitcoin https://cointelegraph.com/news/interview_yurii_rashkovskii_t... I would love to see something like this succeed for all manner of infrastructure... from domains and DNS, to email, to version control.

zomglings 6y ago

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?

account42 6y ago
I am still looking for a good self-hosted solution for code hosting and bug tracking that - Doesn't have excessive server side dependencies or resource requirements - Doesn't have unnecessary client-side requirements (should be fully usable without JS, should not load a million resources to render a single page) - Doesn't make any external requests (except for things like third-party logins where there is no other way) - Has decent UX and visuals
gtirloni 6y ago
I think you should be first asking how easy is it to get free support from GitLab.
- zomglings 6y ago
  We may find out very soon. If this blows up (and it really should), Gitlab may pull a move similar to their automatic migration utility from when Microsoft acquired GitHub.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  For GitLab.com maybe that’s a question, but nobody is going to ban me from my self-hosted service.
  - flak48 6y ago
    Don't mean to sound facetious, but isn't self hosting also technically hosting somewhere ? (Unless you mean actually having access to the physical server where it's running from) In other words are we just assuming Digital Ocean/Hetzner or wherever one 'self-hosts' is less likely to auto ban you for no reason? I would say yes, but I hope others are atleast considering this aspect when comparing this moving to Gitlab or whatever

jtolds 6y ago

Incidentally, what terrible GitHub support that the best way to resolve this is to get help from Twitter or front page here.

save_ferris 6y ago
This is true of far too many major platforms. The only way to get resolution is to yell as loudly as you can on social media or forums and hope it goes viral. Truly terrifying how integral the internet has become and yet due process is nowhere to be found.
- jlokier 6y ago
  I was blocked from my bank account for a week, with my outgoing rent stuck in it. Support (chat only) was mostly unavailable and would disappear before answering, or ask me for things at times I was asleep and be gone when I woke, or send me around in circles. After some research I picked up that their Facebook team was much better than customer services. So I DM'd someone in the bank's Facebook team, and my account was unblocked within 20 minutes.
- erk__ 6y ago
  It has not been possible for me to access my paypalæ account for months. Had a hastely phonenumber change and then all their non-login support lines shut down because of covid. Which have led to me not having any access, as I need a sms to log in.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  And this is wrong. Platform support should stay within the platform. If you are unable to support your users get out of the platform businesses.

smoothgrammer 6y ago

Always do a periodic full off-site cold backup of all your GitHub repos. It's very easy to script and should compress down very small.

the_svd_doctor 6y ago
Is there an easy way to do that ? Some script available somewhere ?
- blocked_again 6y ago
  You can write a simple GitHub action that pushes your repo to GitLab/BitBucket etc every 30 minutes or something.
  - gitgud 6y ago
    Probably better to have the action run on every push to master, no point running it every 30 mins if it hasn't been updated in months...
  - rajesh-s 6y ago
    Do you know an example of this?
    - hundchenkatze 6y ago
      Here's one I found on the Actions marketplace. https://github.com/marketplace/actions/mirroring-repository https://github.com/marketplace/actions/mirroring-repository
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  What I do is run Gitolite in a cheap VPS and then use https://github.com/miracle2k/gitolite-simple-mirror https://github.com/miracle2k/gitolite-simple-mirror to automatically mirror the gitolite repositories to github and gitlab.
- sergiotapia 6y ago

sheogorath 6y ago

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-terms-of-service#l-cancellation-and-termination https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o... People, please read and question terms of online services.

jtolds 6y ago
> A common moral flaw I see in individualist cultures is thinking that "they gave consent" is a good reason to intentionally do something harmful to someone. https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1283038543577788417 https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1283038543577788417
- sheogorath 6y ago
  Well, I would like to point out that the right move here would be to call out this clause in the terms of service. One could even try to take legal action in some countries that have civil right measures against such clauses. But no, instead one runs around and starts a petition.
  - TallGuyShort 6y ago
    Yeah, go ahead and call out that clause. I bet that will do more than the petition.
TallGuyShort 6y ago
He's not taking legal action, he's shedding light on a real dick move with a shitty response from support. He's also allowed to do that.
eropple 6y ago
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".

opqpo 6y ago

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 the word "blacklist"? Maybe it was a mistake, maybe you did something wrong. But maybe you've been neutralized by the silicon valley thought police.

ceejayoz 6y ago
> Facebook doesn't even let you express anything except for ... ultra liberal views. This is absurdly counter-factual.
- opqpo 6y ago
  Just because you can't kill every opinion you don't like and depose every president you don't like and fire every employee who doesn't share your views and close every account on every website that has any different opinion, just like you flagged me doesn't mean it's counter-factual. You liberal extremists the plague of our generation.
  - BillSaysThis 6y ago
    If your assertion were true I wouldn't have needed to block long time friends who continually post opinions such as yours.
    - opqpo 6y ago
      Yes, you're so right to the point that I can't keep a post without being flagged within the first couple of minutes because HN is filled with liberal SS thugs like you.
      - nindalf 6y ago

deadmik3 6y ago

Wait you can get sponsors on github?

ygcodes 6y ago
Yes I got 3 sponsors!
mdaniel 6y ago
I can see why you couldn't find it: their new help search is incredibly bad https://docs.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-community-with-github-sponsors/receiving-sponsorships-through-github-sponsors https://docs.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source...

mikikikik 6y ago

used wayback machine to dig up the most starred projects with their short descriptions. it seems the user has a couple slightly popular projects (10 to 200 stars) about gist and open source contribution tracking. so i think it's most likely a hacked account, given the interest in (extremely) short account names. the fact that they banned it without any message is disturbing. i hope to see what happens to this in a longer time period.

ViViDboarder 6y ago

If you’re doing anything mission critical on GitHub (or even if you aren’t), I highly recommend hosting your own Gitea or GitLab server and, at the very least, use it to mirror to or from your Github repos. Gitea is very lightweight and simple to manage. I use mine as my primary server for personal projects and mirror them to my GitHub account for the network effect. I also have my server mirroring several upstream projects from GitHub to run my Drone build server against, but it also makes sure I can access them should anything happen to the upstream or to my account.

delfinom 6y ago

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 to find the latest copies on your PCs.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
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.

fareesh 6y ago

Probably something to do with this? Mistaken identity maybe https://dev.to/lucis/how-i-got-the-github-username-of-my-dreams-5db5 https://dev.to/lucis/how-i-got-the-github-username-of-my-dre...

harwoodr 6y ago
Or even this one... https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i12 https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... Perhaps someone is trolling him as a result...
- robaato 6y ago
  How times change - comment from OP: https://dev.to/yg/comment/11cog https://dev.to/yg/comment/11cog That's awesome! Agreed they have the best support team I ever have seen!

simonkafan 6y ago

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.

d0100 6y ago
Cue the "it's not a monopoly" crowd. I think we need another word for these companies that are way to big and "monopolize" certain online spaces/communities.
- hundchenkatze 6y ago
  I am in the "it's not a monopoly" crowd and yes we should definitely use other words to describe companies that do not have exclusive control over a commercial activity.
  - theandrewbailey 6y ago
    Exclusive control of an activity isn't needed to be a monopoly. In the 90s, people used Netscape on Macs, but Microsoft got declared a monopoly anyway.
    - hundchenkatze 6y ago
      First I don't think your Netscape on Mac argument holds up. The antitrust suit was about IE on Windows. "[...] the U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the PC market primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java." [0] "The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft had abused monopoly power on Intel-based personal computers in its handling of operating system and web browser integration. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Windows operating system. Bundling them is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of IE." [0] I do agree that exclusive control may not be needed. However, Microsoft was engaging in other anti-competitive behavior. It's not like they're restricting Windows users to only use GitHub. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

babuloseo 6y ago

Woah, this is pretty high profile. Github has been having lots of issues recently. Honestly guys, this started happening ever since they did those new UI changes.

mariopt 6y ago

I've seen similar stuff happening when trying to block spammers. I worked for a major publishing company and we had an issue with the comments, too many spammers. After a review it has easy to see that 90% of the ip address came from India, blocking India was an easy fix although it is unfair for good citizens. Google your office IP address, maybe it got listed on some spam forum and GitHub and others used it. Given you have sponsors, this is a pretty big mistake on their behalf. Probably just a mistake, hope they restore your account.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bibinou 6y ago

Hi Yogi, I'm guessing your Github account has been hijacked. Support won't respond to your emails because it could be the attacker impersonating you, or he could still have access to your email and get info that way. This is Standard Operating Procedure I've seen applied on stolen accounts in MMO videogames involving stolen credit cards and organized crime. Sometimes wait time was 6 months with no contact, because they needed to keep the evidence under seal for the police investigation and avoid tipping off the attackers. Your 2-letter nickname and access to important projects makes your account a high-value target. Did you have 2FA enabled? edit: usually the email account got hijacked first, defeating the 2FA/1-time token. SMS is also easily hackable.

ygcodes 6y ago
Yes I have 2FA and MFA enabled!
- minxomat 6y ago
  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 https://github.com/git-rest/spooky Note how you can read that repo, but the account https://github.com/git-rest https://github.com/git-rest doesn't exist.
  - bibinou 6y ago
    OP got his 2-letter handle via a takeover request: https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i12 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?
    - gus_massa 6y ago
      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.

wayneftw 6y ago

Your change.org petition says 08/07/2020 which hasn't happened yet. Not in the USA at least :) You should probably change that to 07/08/2020 if you're targeting American audiences.

goneri 6y ago
or just 2020/07/08, and avoid any confusion.
- cywick 6y ago
  Or just use 2020-07-08 to avoid any confusion AND be ISO 8601 compliant.
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    Or just never bring this up again so you don't receive downvotes from people for simply pointing out a piece of information. Wow!

jacquesm 6y ago

HN is NOT a support channel for Github, Apple, Microsoft, Paypal, Google and a 100 other services out there that have piss-poor customer support. If the only way to get a rise out of these companies is to abuse HN then that should be indication enough whether or not you should route a critical part of your business through them.

pedrogpimenta 6y ago
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.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  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. Otherwise sooner or later you will be bitten.
  - mako254 6y ago
    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?

gojomo 6y ago

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 was only faced with a generic "activity that looked malicious" message – but no hint of what that might have been. Once I complained, I was restored quickly – but if I'd been on extended vacation, or perhaps even passed away, there'd have remained giant holes, indefinitely, in projects I'd contributed to. Was anything I legitimately did as myself suspect? (They couldn't say.) Was some third party trying to get access – or did they even briefly succeed, perhaps with some compromised credential somewhere? (That was my fear – but they couldn't say & there was no evidence of compromise in what I could see.) After several angry emails about how they shouldn't accuse a longtime paying account in good standing of 'malicious activity' – creating fear of an account compromise of unknown extent – they finally said no, it wasn't unauthorized access (or attempts thereof) but some comment (unspecified in age/topic) that a filter deemed similar to other malicious comments. I'd paid them ~$600 over the previous 5 years, and still had an active subscription with working billing details. My account was nearly a decade old with a wide variety of contributions & comments. But still, an automated system with no apparent human review disappeared my account, without even generating a notification.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
op03 6y ago
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.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  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.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

Outsourcing source control/repositories for software dev. is a suicidal idea and it has always puzzled me that so many devs jumped onto the Github (and friends) bandwagon.

sreevisakh 6y ago
Where else do you host where you can easily attract potential contributors, sponsors and recruiters? Self hosting is not a solution since everyone would have to maintain separate accounts on all those instances. The discoverability is also poor. Git's decentralization is a wasted opportunity if discoverability and participation aren't equally decentralized. On a related note, I like sourcehut's design. I am not completely familiar with it, but I don't think you need an account at all to contribute.

patrickaljord 6y ago

Hope you get your account back soon.

benjaminwootton 6y ago

I also got my account locked when I changed my telephone number and had the email address associated with an old work email. They didn’t seem to be able to unlock it, so I lost a decade worth of projects. I now keep offline backups.

rurban 6y ago

Could have been one if those Indian judges, who flagged it. They are on quite a ride recently.

kuon 6y ago

I think this is the little push I needed to move to my own gita instance. Thank you for sharing, and I wish you the best resolution possible.

clairegraham 6y ago

I had the same thing happen last year, after the Microsoft acquisition. I was migrating my repos to a new github account and it was automatically suspended. No email notice or anything. I guess they saw two different accounts logged in at the same IP and that was enough to trigger it. I contacted them and explained what I was doing and they reinstated it, but I always thought Github allowed and even encouraged "machine users" and thus multiple accounts. I was definitely annoyed with their heavy-handed approach and lost trust; they could have emailed me first and given me a warning before just automatically shutting my account down and restricting access, assuming I'm a bad actor.

njsubedi 6y ago

Whoa! I was talking about the horror stories of losing GitHub account in a several of my latest comments/threads and I get to see another one. Why wouldn't they send out a notice, at least, before deactivating an old, active account?

thephyber 6y ago
> Why wouldn't they send out a notice If it was an account takeover, the malicious user would have changed the email address on account.
- njsubedi 6y ago
  They could send out a notice to old email when they see a recent email change. When people change their email address in a service, that doesn't mean the old, verified email is completely useless.

sidhanthp 6y ago

The same thing happened to my Mom's Facebook account. She's a realtor that used Facebook extensively to stay in contact with her clients, as well as advertise for new business. One day, the account disappeared for malicious activity. PS: if anyone sees this and can help, shoot me a DM on Twitter :)

YooLi 6y ago

I had my username (three letters, my initials) taken and replaced with initials + underscore + number (xxx_123). No comment from GH or even alert they were changing it. I guess someone with friends at GH decided they wanted it. What can you do...

notdang 6y ago
that's almost what the author did here, they found an "unused" github handle that they liked: "yg" and wrote to support to claim it. No need to have friends at GH. https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i12 https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1...

trollied 6y ago

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-i12 https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... I imagine there’s more to this than disclosed.

thisisweird 6y ago
Might be this. https://dev.to/mscccc/hi-im-mike-coutermarsh https://dev.to/mscccc/hi-im-mike-coutermarsh See the comment. This intro post was old but OP’s comment was recent. That guy is a Github Staff. I am not sure though.
elcomet 6y ago
Btw, we can see a funny comment by the author in this article > Agreed they have the best support team I ever have seen!
Yhippa 6y ago
I read the article. What's fishy about this?
- jldugger 6y ago
  That article was posted 10 days ago, on a US public holiday. Seems likely the previous owner only recently reported an account "theft" enabled by github's own support team and name reuse policy. This is exactly why account name reuse is such a bad idea.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  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.