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Comment by spriggan3 | Hacker News Reader

> This feature allows project owners to block users, and prevents blocked users from(...) forking repositories ...

People here don't get that some organisations and individuals will use it to push block lists, unrelated to any Github activity, and depending on your actions on Twitter, Facebook G+ or whatever you'll be blocked in advance from forking, contributing, interacting with a large range or repositories ... same as Twitter Block lists ...

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I get it that you may want to block certain people from bringing negativity to the community (via comments, issues, etc.), but how does preventing them from forking repositories help? It sounds anti-opensource.

Probably to prevent them from doing bad things to the fork graph (eg. Abusive or inflammatory commit messages would come to mind).

Then just hide their part of the graph?

That's what it does.

Why not just make the feature NOT remove the button, but simply hide their fork from the graph? Seems rather simple to implement, and a lot more in the 'spirit' of open source.

You can always run `git clone`, make a new repo, and run `git push`.

Also, this feature already existed for individual accounts, for years, and worked that way. I haven't heard of blocklists for GitHub ever existing. Why do you think this is different for organizations?

If a project on Github blocks you for something you said on Twitter, why do you want to contribute to that project anyway?

And why not? A project is a project, and some twat who happens to have the keys to the Twitter account of that project should not define how you should feel about a community.

Good projects can be infiltrated by overzealous politickers. The @freebsdgirl debacle is a particularly good example of this, as she was also responsible for a certain block bot.

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