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Is this to deter people from using GitHub Actions runners for bad things?

Possibly, but it might be more than that. I have to imagine that GitHub has to fight all sorts of spam. Issues (and comments on issues) in a popular repository can be SPAM. When Hacktoberfest offered a free t-shirt for making a pull request to any repo (regardless of the quality of the PR), maintainers were basically inundated with SPAM. Imagine someone spinning up lots of GitHub accounts to create issues and PRs which are basically just SPAM messages about some crypto scam - PRs proposing changing the readme to their message, issues talking about how they could fund themselves with that crypto, etc. Even if they're deleted by 99% of people, they've served their purpose. Someone thinks they should do what the message says and money is made.

This also prevents legitimate bug reports that are being submitted by people (such as myself) who have no interest in using GitHub to begin with, and even less interest in giving GitHub any kind of personal information.

There have been numerous times now where I'd like to quickly provide details about a problem affecting some GitHub-hosted open source project I'm using, sometimes along with a fix. But since I can't easily create a throwaway GitHub account, I'll just end up keeping the information and fix to myself. I wish that wasn't the case.

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