10 ms·

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 p

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
Yanu-3452 6y ago
Careful about leaping to conclusions, we're hearing one side of a story here.
- zomglings 6y ago
  Thank you, you are right. Felt very powerless in empathy with yg.
- syshum 6y ago
  While true, it is ageless problem that the faceless large corporation does not give a shit about any indivual user of their system Time and time again we see large companies from all markets only respond when public interest is triggered and more than just the individual user starts to question the actions of the company This is the sad reality we are in, if you tie your work, your income, etc to a large corporation you likely will be screwed at some point unless you can cause a public backlash.
- chc 6y ago
  "We're hearing one side of the story" seems to be functioning as a thought-terminating cliche here. Everyone knows we're only hearing one side of the story. The comment you're responding to is asking Github to join the conversation, and noting that the information we have so far looks bad for Github. Nobody is suggesting that Github be summarily executed.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Sick and tired of the 'both sides' argument to shut down discussion. The simple fact that this is seen as a reasonable way to get the attention of the company involved speaks volumes. The best ones are the ones where they can't tell you anything about your own account for policy reasons that are not spelled out because it may help the spammers/criminals/bogeyman du jour.
- smoe 6y ago
  Well the problem seems to be that the other side can't be bothered to give their side of the story. Which is not something unheard of when dealing with large companies. If true,that they did not respond, that would be much more worrisome to me than whatever the reason for the ban might have been.
kylebenzle 6y ago
I've avoided MSFT like the plague for 5 years. When they bought LinkedIn, deleted account. When they bought GitHub, stated using BitBucket. Same with Google. When they went to the dark side I moved to FastMail and DDG. Long story short: don't give your time and money to evil corporations.
- azangru 6y ago
  I'm sure this has nothing to do with Microsoft.
  - ISL 6y ago
    Microsoft owns GitHub, so any GitHub problem is, ultimately, Microsoft's problem.
    - azangru 6y ago
      Fair :-) I meant, nothing to do with Github's acquisition by Microsoft.
      - quadrifoliate 6y ago
        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 GitHub's priorities away from Support and towards Enterprise Sales.
        zeusk 6y ago
        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.
Hamcha 6y ago
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)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- varispeed 6y ago
  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.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    If you self host your repository, your hosting provider can pull the plug If you self-host your repository, you don't have a hosting provider. There is no-one to "pull the plug" on the server at my business's office except the people who work in the building who could literally pull the plug, and I suppose the electricity and phone companies and our ISP. What you are talking about isn't self-hosting, it's hosting in the cloud on VMs you're renting directly. This is an intermediate step between self-hosting and using a fully hosted service like GitHub. With cloud-hosting, you are probably still subject to the whims of your hosting service. For example, you might be subject to occasional forced restarts of a long-lived instance if your hosting service needs to restart or replace the underlying physical server. However, in most cases, unless you're doing something illegal using their equipment or compromising their system in some way, these hosting services don't much care what you're running on your virtual box. This option is still far less risky than using a fully-hosted service, not least because you retain full control over the underlying data so there is almost nothing that can happen because of your hosting provider that a reasonable backup strategy can't fix within a relatively short amount of time.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
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.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The problem is that you wouldn't need a dozen but rather 100+. Support doesn't scale well.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    Why would hiring 100+ customer support reps be a problem for Microsoft?
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      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.
      - joepie91_ 6y ago
        It isn't a free product. It's a paid product with a free "introduction tier" that helps them capture the open-source ecosystem, so that when your company needs paid services, they are the obvious choice because everyone is using it already. Basically the same deal as "educational licenses" for expensive software suites. It isn't a freebie at all; it's an investment into future customer acquisition through lock-in. That's how you're paying for it.
      - c22 6y ago
        They paid $7.5 billion for it so they're already spending much more than that if they keep it running for any less than the next thousand years.
quadrifoliate 6y ago
I have also bookmarked this, and will be sharing it with the few Open Source projects I contribute to as evidence that we should stop using GitHub for crucial work. It's a sad thing since I think they have a more intuitive platform than GitLab or Bitbucket, but seem to be transitioning to a full-blown enterprise obsessed Microsoft division.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  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 any other scheme they come up with. Lambs to the slaughter. Did you really believe that Microsoft suddenly did a 180 and that all the people that thought EEE and hamstringing Linux through proxy lawsuits and outright lies were just fine have left the company?
  - quadrifoliate 6y ago
    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.
    - joepie91_ 6y ago
      Microsoft's "acceptance of open-source" only stretches as far as it helps them survive, in an economy where "why would I buy your product when there's this open-source thing" is a question that gets asked more and more frequently. You know, the "embrace" and "extend" phases of "embrace, extend, extinguish". This is really obvious from the parts that they choose not to open-source, such as https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/intellicode/issues/201 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/intellicode/issues/201
    - agustif 6y ago
simple_phrases 6y ago
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.
- rapnie 6y ago
  And you can still mirror to GH to benefit from the extra visibility and attention this is bringing to your project.
- olyjohn 6y ago
  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.
  - joepie91_ 6y ago
    The problem isn't just the data, it's the access. You can point a domain of your own at a different server if the old server vanishes for some reason, and retain interaction with your users. But if GitHub bans you, good luck with that. They're not just deleting your data; they are removing you from your own community, because they control its environment. Edit: And the domain name system, unlike services like GitHub, actually has processes and mechanisms in place for recovering access and filing disputes.
  - simple_phrases 6y ago
    I have backups, but it's more than just data. GitHub is a platform for collaboration, and should the plug get pulled from the platform, collaboration stops and data living outside of the repositories is lost. I can't afford that down time.
finnthehuman 6y ago
>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. But once the business has it's feet under itself, the github contract of adhesion is a pretty stupid risk to take.
- mratsim 6y ago
  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.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  If you're large enough for it to matter then you're large enough to pay for Github Enterprise and have stronger contracts in place. Then you're not relying on goodwill but the cost of a lawsuit if they fuck with you. And if you can't handle your business relying on contractually and legally defined interconnections with other entities then you really shouldn't be running a business.
manigandham 6y ago
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 all the other new challenges it brings to do it all yourself.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  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.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Without the other side, you have no idea whether their support is in order or not. Being such a large organization leaves millions of possibilities. Is this user even a paid account? Going back to the OP's post, if you leave a vendor for a single 1-sided account of a negative experience, you'll never deal with another company again.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      This is hardly the first instance of these large cloud providers screwing over their customers in terrible ways. The number of these stories on HN alone over the year must number in the 100's if not more. The 'other side' has had a decade or more to get their house in order and has not managed to do so. Support typically is so abysmal that if you need it at all you are screwed. Forking over 1000's of $ / month does not seem to make much difference. The safe default seems to me to believe these stories at face value unless evidence to the contrary has been provided.
      - manigandham 6y ago
oefrha 6y ago
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 handled by the usual responsive team(s).
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  If you are need to gc repos it is likely you are a huge customer that they care about.
  - oefrha 6y ago
    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.
brodock 6y ago
> To anyone reading this from Gitlab, how easy is it to migrate CI/CD off of GitHub Actions to Gitlab? We have example templates for most common languages and frameworks: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/. You can read here for all the supported ways you can create pipelines and define the CI jobs: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/ A TL;DR is that all you need is a base docker image and a list of commands to run. Jobs will run in parallel for each stage, or you can define dependency between then, so they run as an independent DAG. (You can easily import all your projects with a few clicks: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html#import-your-project-from-github-to-gitlab https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html#i... and we get everything from issues, merge requests, to labels milestones, comments, etc.)
- j4yav 6y ago
  I'm the PM for CI at GitLab and I'd also be happy to help. You can reach me at j4yav on Twitter or jason at gitlab.com, DMs are open.
threatofrain 6y ago
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.
- samanthalee233 6y ago
  Do you mind sharing your support ticket number here, or email it to community@gitlab.com? We can help escalate the issue internally. Thanks!
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    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?
    - samanthalee233 6y ago
      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.
      - dsr_ 6y ago
        Is "my account is suspended, I don't know why" considered a "complete blocker"?
        emilycook 6y ago
        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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23827772
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

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

Yanu-3452 6y ago

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

zomglings 6y ago
Thank you, you are right. Felt very powerless in empathy with yg.
syshum 6y ago
While true, it is ageless problem that the faceless large corporation does not give a shit about any indivual user of their system Time and time again we see large companies from all markets only respond when public interest is triggered and more than just the individual user starts to question the actions of the company This is the sad reality we are in, if you tie your work, your income, etc to a large corporation you likely will be screwed at some point unless you can cause a public backlash.
chc 6y ago
"We're hearing one side of the story" seems to be functioning as a thought-terminating cliche here. Everyone knows we're only hearing one side of the story. The comment you're responding to is asking Github to join the conversation, and noting that the information we have so far looks bad for Github. Nobody is suggesting that Github be summarily executed.
jacquesm 6y ago
Sick and tired of the 'both sides' argument to shut down discussion. The simple fact that this is seen as a reasonable way to get the attention of the company involved speaks volumes. The best ones are the ones where they can't tell you anything about your own account for policy reasons that are not spelled out because it may help the spammers/criminals/bogeyman du jour.
smoe 6y ago
Well the problem seems to be that the other side can't be bothered to give their side of the story. Which is not something unheard of when dealing with large companies. If true,that they did not respond, that would be much more worrisome to me than whatever the reason for the ban might have been.

kylebenzle 6y ago

I've avoided MSFT like the plague for 5 years. When they bought LinkedIn, deleted account. When they bought GitHub, stated using BitBucket. Same with Google. When they went to the dark side I moved to FastMail and DDG. Long story short: don't give your time and money to evil corporations.

azangru 6y ago
I'm sure this has nothing to do with Microsoft.
- ISL 6y ago
  Microsoft owns GitHub, so any GitHub problem is, ultimately, Microsoft's problem.
  - azangru 6y ago
    Fair :-) I meant, nothing to do with Github's acquisition by Microsoft.
    - quadrifoliate 6y ago
      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 GitHub's priorities away from Support and towards Enterprise Sales.
      - zeusk 6y ago
        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.

Hamcha 6y ago

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)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
varispeed 6y ago
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.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  If you self host your repository, your hosting provider can pull the plug If you self-host your repository, you don't have a hosting provider. There is no-one to "pull the plug" on the server at my business's office except the people who work in the building who could literally pull the plug, and I suppose the electricity and phone companies and our ISP. What you are talking about isn't self-hosting, it's hosting in the cloud on VMs you're renting directly. This is an intermediate step between self-hosting and using a fully hosted service like GitHub. With cloud-hosting, you are probably still subject to the whims of your hosting service. For example, you might be subject to occasional forced restarts of a long-lived instance if your hosting service needs to restart or replace the underlying physical server. However, in most cases, unless you're doing something illegal using their equipment or compromising their system in some way, these hosting services don't much care what you're running on your virtual box. This option is still far less risky than using a fully-hosted service, not least because you retain full control over the underlying data so there is almost nothing that can happen because of your hosting provider that a reasonable backup strategy can't fix within a relatively short amount of time.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

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.

MattGaiser 6y ago
The problem is that you wouldn't need a dozen but rather 100+. Support doesn't scale well.
- catalogia 6y ago
  Why would hiring 100+ customer support reps be a problem for Microsoft?
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    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.
    - joepie91_ 6y ago
      It isn't a free product. It's a paid product with a free "introduction tier" that helps them capture the open-source ecosystem, so that when your company needs paid services, they are the obvious choice because everyone is using it already. Basically the same deal as "educational licenses" for expensive software suites. It isn't a freebie at all; it's an investment into future customer acquisition through lock-in. That's how you're paying for it.
    - c22 6y ago
      They paid $7.5 billion for it so they're already spending much more than that if they keep it running for any less than the next thousand years.

quadrifoliate 6y ago

I have also bookmarked this, and will be sharing it with the few Open Source projects I contribute to as evidence that we should stop using GitHub for crucial work. It's a sad thing since I think they have a more intuitive platform than GitLab or Bitbucket, but seem to be transitioning to a full-blown enterprise obsessed Microsoft division.

jacquesm 6y ago
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 any other scheme they come up with. Lambs to the slaughter. Did you really believe that Microsoft suddenly did a 180 and that all the people that thought EEE and hamstringing Linux through proxy lawsuits and outright lies were just fine have left the company?
- quadrifoliate 6y ago
  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.
  - joepie91_ 6y ago
    Microsoft's "acceptance of open-source" only stretches as far as it helps them survive, in an economy where "why would I buy your product when there's this open-source thing" is a question that gets asked more and more frequently. You know, the "embrace" and "extend" phases of "embrace, extend, extinguish". This is really obvious from the parts that they choose not to open-source, such as https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/intellicode/issues/201 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/intellicode/issues/201
  - agustif 6y ago

simple_phrases 6y ago

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.

rapnie 6y ago
And you can still mirror to GH to benefit from the extra visibility and attention this is bringing to your project.
olyjohn 6y ago
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.
- joepie91_ 6y ago
  The problem isn't just the data, it's the access. You can point a domain of your own at a different server if the old server vanishes for some reason, and retain interaction with your users. But if GitHub bans you, good luck with that. They're not just deleting your data; they are removing you from your own community, because they control its environment. Edit: And the domain name system, unlike services like GitHub, actually has processes and mechanisms in place for recovering access and filing disputes.
- simple_phrases 6y ago
  I have backups, but it's more than just data. GitHub is a platform for collaboration, and should the plug get pulled from the platform, collaboration stops and data living outside of the repositories is lost. I can't afford that down time.

finnthehuman 6y ago

>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. But once the business has it's feet under itself, the github contract of adhesion is a pretty stupid risk to take.

mratsim 6y ago
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.
marcinzm 6y ago
If you're large enough for it to matter then you're large enough to pay for Github Enterprise and have stronger contracts in place. Then you're not relying on goodwill but the cost of a lawsuit if they fuck with you. And if you can't handle your business relying on contractually and legally defined interconnections with other entities then you really shouldn't be running a business.

manigandham 6y ago

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 all the other new challenges it brings to do it all yourself.

jacquesm 6y ago
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.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Without the other side, you have no idea whether their support is in order or not. Being such a large organization leaves millions of possibilities. Is this user even a paid account? Going back to the OP's post, if you leave a vendor for a single 1-sided account of a negative experience, you'll never deal with another company again.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    This is hardly the first instance of these large cloud providers screwing over their customers in terrible ways. The number of these stories on HN alone over the year must number in the 100's if not more. The 'other side' has had a decade or more to get their house in order and has not managed to do so. Support typically is so abysmal that if you need it at all you are screwed. Forking over 1000's of $ / month does not seem to make much difference. The safe default seems to me to believe these stories at face value unless evidence to the contrary has been provided.
    - manigandham 6y ago

oefrha 6y ago

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 handled by the usual responsive team(s).

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
If you are need to gc repos it is likely you are a huge customer that they care about.
- oefrha 6y ago
  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.

brodock 6y ago

> To anyone reading this from Gitlab, how easy is it to migrate CI/CD off of GitHub Actions to Gitlab? We have example templates for most common languages and frameworks: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/. You can read here for all the supported ways you can create pipelines and define the CI jobs: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/ A TL;DR is that all you need is a base docker image and a list of commands to run. Jobs will run in parallel for each stage, or you can define dependency between then, so they run as an independent DAG. (You can easily import all your projects with a few clicks: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html#import-your-project-from-github-to-gitlab https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html#i... and we get everything from issues, merge requests, to labels milestones, comments, etc.)

j4yav 6y ago
I'm the PM for CI at GitLab and I'd also be happy to help. You can reach me at j4yav on Twitter or jason at gitlab.com, DMs are open.

threatofrain 6y ago

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.

samanthalee233 6y ago
Do you mind sharing your support ticket number here, or email it to community@gitlab.com? We can help escalate the issue internally. Thanks!
- dsr_ 6y ago
  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?
  - samanthalee233 6y ago
    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.
    - dsr_ 6y ago
      Is "my account is suspended, I don't know why" considered a "complete blocker"?
      - emilycook 6y ago
        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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23827772

deleted 6y ago

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