Well, there’s also the point that a person might even regret comments they made!
But the ban is forever, there is zero transparency, and no appeal.
But the ban is forever, there is zero transparency, and no appeal.
If you do the Internet equivalent of walking into GitHub without pants and they kick you off, and you gave them money, we can have a conversation about whether they should give you your money back (I guess I probably would). But other than that, what's there to talk about?
Make a new account that isn't traceable to the reputation you lit on fire, or go to any of the other perfectly viable Git hosting sites. You can even run your own.
I get not wanting to tell your boss why your old GitHub account doesn't work anymore, but: you're going to have to have that conversation, probably.
They tried...
And doing that leaves a blade dangling above your head even if your behavior is perfect on the new account.
Why can't there be anything you can do to wipe the slate mostly clean? Maybe even donating $100 to charity and giving github a few dollars for wasting their time.
GitHub is not going to develop a charity-linked rehabilitation program for people who shit on their carpet. They're just going to ban you. They're a business, not a public utility.
There's some unpleasant subtext to being blocked from GitHub that has nothing to do with someone's ability to write code: it's that your employer is certainly going to ask "uh, why are you not able to make a GitHub account?", and when you tell them "because I shat on GitHub's carpet", they may very well fire you. But that's on you, not GitHub.
That's the standard line. And it has problems when applied to companies with tens of millions of users.
Is it also "deeply unserious" when I say it's bad that shopping malls are privately owned areas masquerading as public spaces, which lets them ban people in ways that actual public spaces can't? Because there's a lot of literature on that topic, and I see it as pretty similar.
I'm talking about what should be, what is good for society. Not how the legal system currently works. Talking about that is not "deeply unserious".
And nothing about the collapse of malls changes that either.
Malls lasted a long time. But why is that a stupid decision? Let's not even say "decision" though, let's just say every mall offered to rent the hallways out to the local government at a nominal fee, nothing else changed, no lock in. Wouldn't that be a significant improvement?
And when I said earlier, tens of millions of users, if github wants to be small again then it will go back to the bottom of the sliding scale.
(I'm probably being hyperbolic, but I'm sorely tempted to test the hypothesis with the search bar below.)
Related: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/beneath-the-skyway/
Regardless of that, my entire org relies on github globally. If we could not onboard or retain someone due to this I would raise this with our risk and compliance board and the product would be written off from the accepted vendors list almost immediately and cause a fuck load of evaluation and migration work and a $100k/year enterprise customer to disappear for them. That's how bad this is.
We already did this to two other vendors and we don't get a choice. It's a business risk.
I see complaints with zero solutions for a private company.
But in other countries, is more complicated than that.
In Brazil, those kinds of bans behaviors are not ok under consumer protection laws, and also their TOS where they don’t guarantee anything even for paid accounts is definitely not ok and suable for damages if something happens.
Did the first line about regretting the comments not indicate that pretty clearly?
I really don't want to accuse you of being deceptive for rhetorical effect, but are you actually "beginning" to think this? Am I completely misreading your comments?
Edit: This comment was a waste of space and I didn't express myself well but I was half a minute too slow on the delete button.
```
Your accounts were disabled following reports that its content or activity may have been in violation of the following prohibition found in our Acceptable Use Policies:
"We do not allow content or activity on GitHub that:
is off-topic, or interacts with platform features in a way that significantly or repeatedly disrupts the experience of other users"
Specifically, the activity that was reported included posting repetitive and disruptive comments in Visual Studio repositories, which we found to be in violation of our Acceptable Use Policies.
```
I’m not going to paraphrase because the threads were erased. I don’t have most of the comments actually.
Mail me at my username at duck.com and I’ll send you the handles of the account, you can search GitHub yourself.
Offices (and SaaS products) are dangling on a thin thread. It doesn't take a lot to lose customers. Lots of them. Especially when working from home (hosted gitlab) is a reasonable option. Most offices near me are converted to housing. You can't convert github to housing so it has even less tangible value if it pisses users off which starts a chain reaction of risk.
It's also bloody unreliable and in the forefront of people's attention for risk already.
Let us know how that goes for you.