8 ms·

Starring your repo does not give you permission to spam me

178 points by victorstanciu 5y ago

kioleanu 5y ago
Oh my, that goes against so many EU regulations
pxeger1 5y ago
I've reported this to GitHub https://support.github.com/contact/report-abuse https://support.github.com/contact/report-abuse
- cxr 5y ago
  I've received several instances of spam to the public email address I have listed in my unused GitHub account. I've reported it to GitHub plenty, but I've never received any response.
  - 3np 5y ago
    ...It's public, what is GitHub supposed to do about it? Hide currently public views behind a signup-wall? And how much would that actually achieve in practice? Should they start requiring phone number validation and ID for signups? I suggest using a fake, or at least a dedicated, e-mail address for commit messages. If you are talking about the e-mail in your GH profile, you can mark it as private in settings. Or use their built-in function to mask it (they will replace it with an address under their domain and forward incomings to you). There are many valid complaints about GitHub but with regards to this I think they've done what they can already. If you don't want spam to your address, don't put it in public. It will be scraped. OP put their e-mail in cleartext, unobfuscated, in their profile. The blame is on part of the spammers. Countermeasures should be done by OP (and their e-mail host), not by GH.
    - cxr 5y ago
      > It's public, what is GitHub supposed to do about it? What thought processes went into asking this question? You are the person who commented on this same topic that "scraping and processing e-mail addresses associated with GH handles could be a regulatory violation without even sending anything[...] It's certainly against GH ToS". To state what should be the obvious here: when GitHub goes through the effort of writing an acceptable use policy, and I have evidence that certain users/orgs are sending out spam despite that, then I expect GitHub to, you know, actually investigate and do something about it using the leverage that they have, e.g. by ultimately suspending the accounts of the spammers if they don't knock it off. > I suggest using a fake, or at least a dedicated, e-mail address for commit messages. I'm not talking about commit messages. > If you are talking about the e-mail in your GH profile, you can mark it as private in settings. That's the default. I have deliberately gone through the effort to make it public so that people who are making acceptable use of GitHub can use it for what it's there for—not for people who aren't to abuse it. > There are many valid complaints about GitHub but with regards to this I think they've done what they can already. Bullshit. To set up an intake form for people to report abuse and then never act on reports of abuse is not doing "what they can". (If nothing else, then take the damn form down so I can cut my losses at the time I've wasted dealing with the initial receipt of the spammy stuff and I don't additionally waste even more time reporting it on the belief that they're going to act on it and so that it to save other people time in the long run.)
      - 3np 5y ago
        Consider that a malicious party could send spam posing to be someone else, in order to have their account taken down. Really proving that is possible (assuming the sender has done proper setup of their DNS records or utilizing cryptographic signatures) but resources in verifying that is going beyond what I think we can expect. Regardless, even if Github did take the sender account down and you removed it from your profile, your e-mail address is most likely on lists used to send spam not linkable to GH accounts and will continue being so for a long time moving forward. Whomever you're reporting is just a drip in that ocean. Spam is frustrating and illegal but you're barking up the wrong tree.
        5y ago
    - shbooms 5y ago
      > OP put their e-mail in cleartext, unobfuscated, in their profile. The blame is on part of the spammers. Countermeasures should be done by OP (and their e-mail host), not by GH. According Github's site policies [0], they've explicitly outlawed this type of behavior meaning it's their responsibility to police and enforce this by punishing users on their platform who they find to be engaging in it: "You may not use information from the Service (whether scraped, collected through our API, or obtained otherwise) for spamming purposes, including for the purposes of sending unsolicited emails to users" [0] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-policies/github-acceptable-use-policies#7-information-usage-restrictions https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici...
      - undefinedzero 5y ago
        If you publish your email on your profile, aren't all emails basically solicited? What other purpose might posting your email on your profile have other than for people to reach out without you explicitly asking for it? If you want to be selective in what people email you about, you can always move your email to your personal readme with further restrictions.
        coldpie 5y ago
        "People reaching out" is fine. "Automated bulk email" is not.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
fortran77 5y ago
- victorstanciu 5y ago
  The title of the post is addressed to everyone who reads it.
- lozenge 5y ago
  Collective action? On my open platform? It's more likely than you think.
- Macha 5y ago
  Many HN users love to promote this kind of hustling/growth hacking behaviour as shown in the post, so I think deserve a periodic reminder of how it's recieved on the target side to dissuade people who do make those decisions from going too far.
- njkleiner 5y ago
  > mild anti-social behavior Interesting way of spelling "illegal misuse of personal information under GDPR".
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    That only applies if both the sender and receiver are in the EU. It's probably also illegal to own a business at all in North Korea, but that law also doesn't apply to either person in this situation.
    - njkleiner 5y ago
      > That only applies if both the sender and receiver are in the EU. I'm under the impression that GDPR Article 3 (2) does apply in the case at hand, which is marketing emails sent by a US company to an EU resident.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  > mild anti-social behavior Spamming on a large scale is more serious. > can be handled directly more efficiently? How? (I have no time and money to sue them)
welfare 5y ago
GDPR has entered the chat
- pixelbreaker 5y ago
  Did it get permission first?
gyulai 5y ago
I really like the spirit of "fighting back" here, by making this grievance public.
dustingetz 5y ago
Would love github to add social features to opt-in to communication from maintainers. There is no good way today to email changelogs to your users.
- maxloh 5y ago
  They will if they subscribed to your repo's new releases (with GitHub's "watch" function)
  - eatonphil 5y ago
    The problem is that this subscribes them to everything. I used to use watch but I could care less about every individual commit on anything other than projects I'm actively working on. Watch is not a good substitute for a way to learn about important changes on an infrequent, regular basis (i.e. once a month emails).
    - matthews2 5y ago
      Try clicking the watch button now. It changed a while ago, and you can narrow it down to certain events (releases, commits, issues, PRs, etc.)
      - eatonphil 5y ago
        Gotcha that's a good improvement. But this still only works by showing a visual change in your feed at the time of the release. What if I care about software but don't spend all day on Github's logged in homepage/activity feed? Email is the only reliable way to send/receive important updates for any meaningful project.
        iampims 5y ago
        You get an email if you subscribe to releases.
        5y ago
FearNotDaniel 5y ago
As somebody who likes to assume good intentions, I would have hoped your second attempt at unsubscribing was to send a polite, nonadversarial email asking to be removed from the email list you never willingly joined. Assuming that fell on deaf ears, I can understand where you're coming from.
- victorstanciu 5y ago
  My nonadversarial action was to ignore the first email, that's all the consideration I am willing to give. The onus is not on me to politely ask to be removed from anything.
  - maccard 5y ago
    You gave more consideration than was deserved. I would have flagged the first one as spam.
- RSZC 5y ago
  Oversimplifying, but an unsubscribe link is a legal requirement under many different laws (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL) for this sort of email. It's 2022, unsubscribe links are a solved problem, I'm not going to assume good intentions for somebody who is purposefully breaking the law in order to spam me.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  > polite, nonadversarial email Spammers are not entitled to private and nonadversarial communication. Note that in numerous jurisdictions both sending spam and not including unsubscribe link is actively illegal.
- maccard 5y ago
  > I would have hoped your second attempt at unsubscribing was to send a polite, nonadversarial email asking to be removed from the email list you never willingly joined. Assuming that fell on deaf ears, I can understand where you're coming from. No, absolutely not. You put an unsubscribe button in the footer of the email or I'm marking it as spam. That's _entirely_ on you if you don't do that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
SloopJon 5y ago
Um, am I the only one who had no idea that my Github stars are public knowledge? I don't see anything about this in the documentation or on my stars page. Can anyone see this, or just the admin for the repo that I starred?
- Macha 5y ago
  It's totally public, for example, here are the stars for the Vue repository: https://github.com/vuejs/vue-cli/stargazers https://github.com/vuejs/vue-cli/stargazers, or the stars by its primary author: https://github.com/yyx990803?tab=stars https://github.com/yyx990803?tab=stars
- calmingsolitude 5y ago
  Stars are public - navigating to any GitHub profile and clicking the 'Stars' tab shows all the repositories starred by the user. Moreover, all users that have starred a repository can be viewed by appending /stargazers to the repo url or clicking the stars link in the sidebar.
  - minimaxir 5y ago
    More importantly, there is an API endpoint for /stargazers. If you really wanted to get GitHub data in bulk for illicit purposes and you know how to work with big data you can get it from the GitHub Archive but that’s a topic for another day. (Although it may not have user emails)
- boring_twenties 5y ago
  Any ssh pubkeys you've entered into your github account are public too, just FYI.
  - tailspin2019 5y ago
    Did not know that…
- electroly 5y ago
  It's not only public but new stars appear on the creator's GitHub news feed when they happen, with username included.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mrskitch 5y ago
Hey folks, Joel here, I'm the original maker behind browserless. You've seen us before on HN -- I'm very sorry for this situation. We didn’t intend to SPAM you or send unsolicited emails, we just wanted to ask for feedback. Being an open-source/boostrapped service, feedback is really important for us, so that’s why we thought it might be a good idea to reach out to people directly. But now it's clear that that was a wrong decision. We stopped doing that and won’t do it again. Sorry, it won’t happen again.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Hey man don't worry too much. It's usually just the vocal one percent, some of us get annoyed, some of us have the world seemingly fall down around us when a "spam" notice arrives.
- 3np 5y ago
  I guess now that you read through the comments, you learned this lesson. As someone who agree with the harsh ones, I appreciate your apology and being forthright about it. For the future, you can utilize the tools given in GitHub - add a link and/or call-for-action in docs/README/release notes, pin an issue, Discussions. Depending on your jurisdiction, status, and purpose, merely scraping and processing e-mail addresses associated with GH handles could be a regulatory violation without even sending anything. It's certainly against GH ToS. You'd do best in ensuring you wipe anything acquired without consent. This kind of thing was seen differently in the 90s and early 00s. Times change.
- raldi 5y ago
  Perfect apology
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- victorstanciu 5y ago
  Hey man, I believe most of us here know how hard it is to bootstrap something and lift it off the ground. From my side, I admire your product, and I admire the hell out of the fact that you've open sourced it. Which is why I would have totally been fine with just the first email, but the second one pushed it from "start-up founder struggling to get momentum" to "spammer that won't leave me alone". You were just too aggressive about it, but I do think the way you're handling it now is great. There's one thing I'm honestly curious of, because I've seen this technique before, and it's not necessarily a question to you, but to anyone who might read this: do these pretend-personal emails actually work on anyone? Your product is targeted at users with a pretty high technical skillset, do you think they really believe you hand-wrote that email? Because I could smell the automation right away, even before I checked the message source and saw the HTML structure and the tracking image. It's fake, it feels fake, and to me it's actually worse than an openly-automated message, because it insults me by assuming I can't tell it's not sent by a human. I think perhaps tactics like these work better on less-technical people (though they still shouldn't be employed at all!)
imcotton 5y ago
The README page has an embedded demo.gif which is 24.8 MB (just in case...)
pdepip 5y ago
I think the bigger problem is we preach user feedback as the holy grail of product growth, but it's hard to do so when you fully respect privacy (i.e. no sign ups). For example, when I built https://github.com/pdepip/mmap.it https://github.com/pdepip/mmap.it I made the conscious decision to not require any log in information but quickly found I was unable to find who was using my product and then ask them for feedback - so user led development stalled.
- dessant 5y ago
  You can ask for anonymous feedback directly in the app instead of emailing users.
- account42 5y ago
  Ctrl+F forum, mailing list, email, @ etc. all 0 results GitHub discussions not enabled on the repo > https://mmap.it/ https://mmap.it/ 404 Page not found The way to get feedback without being obnoxious is to provide ways for users to give you feedback on their own terms. Bonus points if you build a community where you can ask questions as needed.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  Create a pinned issue with title "We ask for feedback" Mention it in the Readme.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I feel that part of the problem is that we now have a "notoriety economy." Social media tools have "gamified" the process of interacting with each other, so we're constantly looking for "high scores," and actually become dependent on them. For myself, I have very few stars on my repos (the one that got a bunch has been passed on to a different team, and I'm happy to have it off my table). I'm totally fine with that. I write software for myself. Publishing it as shipped, supported, documented, and tested product is more an exercise in Quality, than it is an effort to get stars. The fewer people that depend on my stuff, the better.
imwillofficial 5y ago
I think they came down to harshly. Somebody stepped over the line a little too far and they stomped on his dick. This is not the way.

178 points by victorstanciu 5y ago

Oh my, that goes against so many EU regulations

I've reported this to GitHub https://support.github.com/contact/report-abuse https://support.github.com/contact/report-abuse

cxr 5y ago
I've received several instances of spam to the public email address I have listed in my unused GitHub account. I've reported it to GitHub plenty, but I've never received any response.
- 3np 5y ago
  ...It's public, what is GitHub supposed to do about it? Hide currently public views behind a signup-wall? And how much would that actually achieve in practice? Should they start requiring phone number validation and ID for signups? I suggest using a fake, or at least a dedicated, e-mail address for commit messages. If you are talking about the e-mail in your GH profile, you can mark it as private in settings. Or use their built-in function to mask it (they will replace it with an address under their domain and forward incomings to you). There are many valid complaints about GitHub but with regards to this I think they've done what they can already. If you don't want spam to your address, don't put it in public. It will be scraped. OP put their e-mail in cleartext, unobfuscated, in their profile. The blame is on part of the spammers. Countermeasures should be done by OP (and their e-mail host), not by GH.
  - cxr 5y ago
    > It's public, what is GitHub supposed to do about it? What thought processes went into asking this question? You are the person who commented on this same topic that "scraping and processing e-mail addresses associated with GH handles could be a regulatory violation without even sending anything[...] It's certainly against GH ToS". To state what should be the obvious here: when GitHub goes through the effort of writing an acceptable use policy, and I have evidence that certain users/orgs are sending out spam despite that, then I expect GitHub to, you know, actually investigate and do something about it using the leverage that they have, e.g. by ultimately suspending the accounts of the spammers if they don't knock it off. > I suggest using a fake, or at least a dedicated, e-mail address for commit messages. I'm not talking about commit messages. > If you are talking about the e-mail in your GH profile, you can mark it as private in settings. That's the default. I have deliberately gone through the effort to make it public so that people who are making acceptable use of GitHub can use it for what it's there for—not for people who aren't to abuse it. > There are many valid complaints about GitHub but with regards to this I think they've done what they can already. Bullshit. To set up an intake form for people to report abuse and then never act on reports of abuse is not doing "what they can". (If nothing else, then take the damn form down so I can cut my losses at the time I've wasted dealing with the initial receipt of the spammy stuff and I don't additionally waste even more time reporting it on the belief that they're going to act on it and so that it to save other people time in the long run.)
    - 3np 5y ago
      Consider that a malicious party could send spam posing to be someone else, in order to have their account taken down. Really proving that is possible (assuming the sender has done proper setup of their DNS records or utilizing cryptographic signatures) but resources in verifying that is going beyond what I think we can expect. Regardless, even if Github did take the sender account down and you removed it from your profile, your e-mail address is most likely on lists used to send spam not linkable to GH accounts and will continue being so for a long time moving forward. Whomever you're reporting is just a drip in that ocean. Spam is frustrating and illegal but you're barking up the wrong tree.
      - 5y ago
  - shbooms 5y ago
    > OP put their e-mail in cleartext, unobfuscated, in their profile. The blame is on part of the spammers. Countermeasures should be done by OP (and their e-mail host), not by GH. According Github's site policies [0], they've explicitly outlawed this type of behavior meaning it's their responsibility to police and enforce this by punishing users on their platform who they find to be engaging in it: "You may not use information from the Service (whether scraped, collected through our API, or obtained otherwise) for spamming purposes, including for the purposes of sending unsolicited emails to users" [0] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-policies/github-acceptable-use-policies#7-information-usage-restrictions https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici...
    - undefinedzero 5y ago
      If you publish your email on your profile, aren't all emails basically solicited? What other purpose might posting your email on your profile have other than for people to reach out without you explicitly asking for it? If you want to be selective in what people email you about, you can always move your email to your personal readme with further restrictions.
      - coldpie 5y ago
        "People reaching out" is fine. "Automated bulk email" is not.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

fortran77 5y ago

victorstanciu 5y ago
The title of the post is addressed to everyone who reads it.
lozenge 5y ago
Collective action? On my open platform? It's more likely than you think.
Macha 5y ago
Many HN users love to promote this kind of hustling/growth hacking behaviour as shown in the post, so I think deserve a periodic reminder of how it's recieved on the target side to dissuade people who do make those decisions from going too far.
njkleiner 5y ago
> mild anti-social behavior Interesting way of spelling "illegal misuse of personal information under GDPR".
- jjeaff 5y ago
  That only applies if both the sender and receiver are in the EU. It's probably also illegal to own a business at all in North Korea, but that law also doesn't apply to either person in this situation.
  - njkleiner 5y ago
    > That only applies if both the sender and receiver are in the EU. I'm under the impression that GDPR Article 3 (2) does apply in the case at hand, which is marketing emails sent by a US company to an EU resident.
matkoniecz 5y ago
> mild anti-social behavior Spamming on a large scale is more serious. > can be handled directly more efficiently? How? (I have no time and money to sue them)

welfare 5y ago

GDPR has entered the chat

pixelbreaker 5y ago
Did it get permission first?

gyulai 5y ago

I really like the spirit of "fighting back" here, by making this grievance public.

dustingetz 5y ago

Would love github to add social features to opt-in to communication from maintainers. There is no good way today to email changelogs to your users.

maxloh 5y ago
They will if they subscribed to your repo's new releases (with GitHub's "watch" function)
- eatonphil 5y ago
  The problem is that this subscribes them to everything. I used to use watch but I could care less about every individual commit on anything other than projects I'm actively working on. Watch is not a good substitute for a way to learn about important changes on an infrequent, regular basis (i.e. once a month emails).
  - matthews2 5y ago
    Try clicking the watch button now. It changed a while ago, and you can narrow it down to certain events (releases, commits, issues, PRs, etc.)
    - eatonphil 5y ago
      Gotcha that's a good improvement. But this still only works by showing a visual change in your feed at the time of the release. What if I care about software but don't spend all day on Github's logged in homepage/activity feed? Email is the only reliable way to send/receive important updates for any meaningful project.
      - iampims 5y ago
        You get an email if you subscribe to releases.
        5y ago

FearNotDaniel 5y ago

As somebody who likes to assume good intentions, I would have hoped your second attempt at unsubscribing was to send a polite, nonadversarial email asking to be removed from the email list you never willingly joined. Assuming that fell on deaf ears, I can understand where you're coming from.

victorstanciu 5y ago
My nonadversarial action was to ignore the first email, that's all the consideration I am willing to give. The onus is not on me to politely ask to be removed from anything.
- maccard 5y ago
  You gave more consideration than was deserved. I would have flagged the first one as spam.
RSZC 5y ago
Oversimplifying, but an unsubscribe link is a legal requirement under many different laws (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL) for this sort of email. It's 2022, unsubscribe links are a solved problem, I'm not going to assume good intentions for somebody who is purposefully breaking the law in order to spam me.
matkoniecz 5y ago
> polite, nonadversarial email Spammers are not entitled to private and nonadversarial communication. Note that in numerous jurisdictions both sending spam and not including unsubscribe link is actively illegal.
maccard 5y ago
> I would have hoped your second attempt at unsubscribing was to send a polite, nonadversarial email asking to be removed from the email list you never willingly joined. Assuming that fell on deaf ears, I can understand where you're coming from. No, absolutely not. You put an unsubscribe button in the footer of the email or I'm marking it as spam. That's _entirely_ on you if you don't do that.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

SloopJon 5y ago

Um, am I the only one who had no idea that my Github stars are public knowledge? I don't see anything about this in the documentation or on my stars page. Can anyone see this, or just the admin for the repo that I starred?

Macha 5y ago
It's totally public, for example, here are the stars for the Vue repository: https://github.com/vuejs/vue-cli/stargazers https://github.com/vuejs/vue-cli/stargazers, or the stars by its primary author: https://github.com/yyx990803?tab=stars https://github.com/yyx990803?tab=stars
calmingsolitude 5y ago
Stars are public - navigating to any GitHub profile and clicking the 'Stars' tab shows all the repositories starred by the user. Moreover, all users that have starred a repository can be viewed by appending /stargazers to the repo url or clicking the stars link in the sidebar.
- minimaxir 5y ago
  More importantly, there is an API endpoint for /stargazers. If you really wanted to get GitHub data in bulk for illicit purposes and you know how to work with big data you can get it from the GitHub Archive but that’s a topic for another day. (Although it may not have user emails)
boring_twenties 5y ago
Any ssh pubkeys you've entered into your github account are public too, just FYI.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  Did not know that…
electroly 5y ago
It's not only public but new stars appear on the creator's GitHub news feed when they happen, with username included.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mrskitch 5y ago

Hey folks, Joel here, I'm the original maker behind browserless. You've seen us before on HN -- I'm very sorry for this situation. We didn’t intend to SPAM you or send unsolicited emails, we just wanted to ask for feedback. Being an open-source/boostrapped service, feedback is really important for us, so that’s why we thought it might be a good idea to reach out to people directly. But now it's clear that that was a wrong decision. We stopped doing that and won’t do it again. Sorry, it won’t happen again.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Hey man don't worry too much. It's usually just the vocal one percent, some of us get annoyed, some of us have the world seemingly fall down around us when a "spam" notice arrives.
3np 5y ago
I guess now that you read through the comments, you learned this lesson. As someone who agree with the harsh ones, I appreciate your apology and being forthright about it. For the future, you can utilize the tools given in GitHub - add a link and/or call-for-action in docs/README/release notes, pin an issue, Discussions. Depending on your jurisdiction, status, and purpose, merely scraping and processing e-mail addresses associated with GH handles could be a regulatory violation without even sending anything. It's certainly against GH ToS. You'd do best in ensuring you wipe anything acquired without consent. This kind of thing was seen differently in the 90s and early 00s. Times change.
raldi 5y ago
Perfect apology
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
victorstanciu 5y ago
Hey man, I believe most of us here know how hard it is to bootstrap something and lift it off the ground. From my side, I admire your product, and I admire the hell out of the fact that you've open sourced it. Which is why I would have totally been fine with just the first email, but the second one pushed it from "start-up founder struggling to get momentum" to "spammer that won't leave me alone". You were just too aggressive about it, but I do think the way you're handling it now is great. There's one thing I'm honestly curious of, because I've seen this technique before, and it's not necessarily a question to you, but to anyone who might read this: do these pretend-personal emails actually work on anyone? Your product is targeted at users with a pretty high technical skillset, do you think they really believe you hand-wrote that email? Because I could smell the automation right away, even before I checked the message source and saw the HTML structure and the tracking image. It's fake, it feels fake, and to me it's actually worse than an openly-automated message, because it insults me by assuming I can't tell it's not sent by a human. I think perhaps tactics like these work better on less-technical people (though they still shouldn't be employed at all!)

imcotton 5y ago

The README page has an embedded demo.gif which is 24.8 MB (just in case...)

pdepip 5y ago

I think the bigger problem is we preach user feedback as the holy grail of product growth, but it's hard to do so when you fully respect privacy (i.e. no sign ups). For example, when I built https://github.com/pdepip/mmap.it https://github.com/pdepip/mmap.it I made the conscious decision to not require any log in information but quickly found I was unable to find who was using my product and then ask them for feedback - so user led development stalled.

dessant 5y ago
You can ask for anonymous feedback directly in the app instead of emailing users.
account42 5y ago
Ctrl+F forum, mailing list, email, @ etc. all 0 results GitHub discussions not enabled on the repo > https://mmap.it/ https://mmap.it/ 404 Page not found The way to get feedback without being obnoxious is to provide ways for users to give you feedback on their own terms. Bonus points if you build a community where you can ask questions as needed.
matkoniecz 5y ago
Create a pinned issue with title "We ask for feedback" Mention it in the Readme.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I feel that part of the problem is that we now have a "notoriety economy." Social media tools have "gamified" the process of interacting with each other, so we're constantly looking for "high scores," and actually become dependent on them. For myself, I have very few stars on my repos (the one that got a bunch has been passed on to a different team, and I'm happy to have it off my table). I'm totally fine with that. I write software for myself. Publishing it as shipped, supported, documented, and tested product is more an exercise in Quality, than it is an effort to get stars. The fewer people that depend on my stuff, the better.

imwillofficial 5y ago

I think they came down to harshly. Somebody stepped over the line a little too far and they stomped on his dick. This is not the way.