Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

There is no way to create a regular account on Travis. It's only sign in with GitHub and a few others that they added recently.

https://app.travis-ci.com/signin

I understand why they are doing it, because they have to pull from GitHub, but it's not the only way. They could create a regular user on GitHub and ask people to let that user pull from their repositories. Obviously it's more trouble for the user, it would harm adoption and growth, that user could be banned and halt all of Travis.

Travis is the only site I have ever used in that way, because I have a customer that uses it. With hindsight I think that I should create a per customer account on GitHub, just in case something bad happens to Travis.

View on HN

I believe it goes against the ToS for Microsoft GitHub to have more than one account per human.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

> One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free Account

This means that for nearly all of us it is one account per person.

The rules are more relaxed for corporations

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-c...

> A User’s login may not be shared by multiple people.

and that's it.

So there could be joe@company1.com, joe@company2.com, etc. Probably only the joe in his current company can login because the others have revoked its access.

> With hindsight I think that I should create a per customer account on GitHub, just in case something bad happens to Travis.

Is it too late to do that?

My immediate line of thinking to this thread of "sometimes you have to use an account to sign in" was that then you'll need to create a new account specifically to sign into that service. If you have to sign into that service. Maybe I'm weird, but I tend to even use a DuckDuckGo e-mail when I sign up, so that a specific service is in no way linked directly to me and so that I can stop forwarding e-mails from any specific service.

To be fair, I sort of wonder why Github has an API that allows 3rd parties to star projects with your account. I get that the author of this post on HN is responsible for not reading the "clicked through pages" part of the processes and that they should consider themselves sort of lucky it was only abused for star farming, but why do we have that sort of "facebooky" functionality on Github in the first place?

A lot of the APIs that allow for things like starring projects have been around for a long time. Before GitHub introduced an official mobile app there were a number of unofficial mobile apps that used those types of APIs to give users a “fully functional” GitHub app.

I would say though that if GitHub is allowing requests like that through the API then they should be banning the API token and the account it was issued to if it uses the API maliciously

> With hindsight I think that I should create a per customer account on GitHub, just in case something bad happens to Travis.

In case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33906591

Reply on news.ycombinator.com