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Oh guffaw. Even our beloved Github has a means to let you unseat inactive account names. https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-policy https://help.gi
by simonsarris 13y ago
Oh guffaw. Even our beloved Github has a means to let you unseat inactive account names.
https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-policy https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-policy
(And they should, I think.)
Since at least 2012 Instagram has had this in their terms:
> 4. We reserve the right to force forfeiture of any username that becomes inactive, violates trademark, or may mislead other users.
So whine about the policy if you don't like it, but don't whine that Instagram has materially changed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- frodopwns 13y agoWhere does it say this account was inactive? IF it says such a thing anywhere how long was it inactive?
- randartie 13y agoThe article itself claims it was inactive.
- albedoa 13y agoCan you tell us where? I don't see it.
- frodopwns 13y agoIncorrect. The original article says nothing of the sort. The update which came after your post says this however: "Our only guess is that she did not post as often as they might not have liked." But he does say elsewhere that she used it often to rate images. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599802
- bnferguson 13y agoIt absolutely happens at GitHub, but we typically will reach out to a dormant user to ask if they can get the name if a need comes up (and sometimes send goodies in thanks). Overall it's pretty painless, and the dormant users are thankful for the notification.
- theswan 13y agoThanks for this! Just nabbed https://github.com/stephen https://github.com/stephen was inactive since 2008.
- brandonpayton 13y agoThe idea of renaming an account on Github concerns me because an account's repos may be referenced by others' git submodules. I'd hate to find one of my repos inadvertently referencing a repo I did not intend to reference.
- josephlord 13y agoGood point, also Ruby Gemfiles can reference github repos. For both Gemfiles and submodules this is an extra reason to fork the original and reference your fork rather than directly link to the original (unless it is big and reliable and unlikely to to be replaced e.g. rails).
- bnferguson 13y agoYeah, that's totally understandable. Fortunately almost all of these cases are for accounts with no repositories. In cases where an account does have repositories (user initiated renames) the old URLs/repos will redirect as long as another user doesn't take the old name and create repos with the same name[1]. [1] https://help.github.com/articles/what-happens-when-i-change-my-username https://help.github.com/articles/what-happens-when-i-change-...
- jonsuh 13y agoBrian addressed the account activity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599802 Shouldn't have been considered inactive.
- mikeleeorg 13y agoExactly. My Github account looks dormant because I don't have many public repos, but I check in code nearly every day in a bunch of private repos. Don't assume that an account is inactive just because it has no public posts. A company should determine active/inactive status based on logins.