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Comment by clon | Hacker News Reader

All of GH improvements have become irrelevant for me since they vanished one of our repos. No notification, no warning, no recourse. Just gonsky. It was just a simple library we wrote to talk to a public IP2Country REST service. Pushed to GitLab, end of.

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Cannot edit any more, but it is important to clear this up. Apparently the repo did not vanish, it was deleted by a member of the team, who decided to keep silent about it for some reason.

Tip - there is a "deleted repos" section in GitHub UI where they will appear, apparently with an option to restore them.

In short - all I said seems to have been nonsense. Apologies!

I find in situations like these that it's pretty unlikely that the person telling the story really has no idea why something bad happened to them.

You are right. I have a hunch. In the local repo there is a file that was was probably produced by running wget github.com im the repo directory. Unsure what it was meant to achieve, but accidentally pushed, it may have flagged the repo down somehow. Maybe the HTML contained some secret token?

Still, the main issue was the process how they handled it. Your build breaks. This is how we found out.

Martin from GitHub here - love to understand what happened if you have the time to point me at more details. DM's open (martinwoodward on twitter and martinwoodward at github.com on email)

I will send the repo URL in a few hours. Thanks for following up.

This is part of the problem.

No recourse for such decisions unless you make a stink about it on an orange website or get enough likes on the website with the blue bird logo.

Do you know whether the poster with a GitHub issue ever bothered reaching out to Enterprise support?

Probably wasn't a decision. And if it was, I'm sure it's much more complicated than OP is letting on.

Even an automated decision is a decision, because someone decided that's how the system should operate. Perhaps it was a bug?

Furthermore, no: GitHub has a history of being bad at this kind of thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22593595

From the linked article: "A week after I’ve opened the support ticket, GitHub has finally replied. Suspiciously, this happened right after someone important has posted a link to this article on Hacker News"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22628961

Top comment: GitHub CEO coming in and apologising. From the linked tweet: "You sited US trade sanctions and sent me a non-descriptive email with no remediation information".

Clearly not that irrelevant if you're in here commenting.

Should qualify that. I never said it doesn't sadden me to miss out on cool things. But professionally they are indeed irrelevant.

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