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Comment by heinekan | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been on the other side of this.

I asked GitHub if they could change my username to one that was already taken. As long as the account does not have repos of their own and was deemed sufficiently inactive they can take it.

The support staff approved my request, but I have friends who’ve gotten declined.

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I've actually had a (great) username completely blackholed by github. I'm still a bit salty about it.

I had received an email several years ago informing me that it was going to be removed. They gave me the equivalent to a coupon for a free year of the github personal plan as compensation.

To this day it'll tell you that the username is "unavailable" if you try to sign up with it, and the page just 404s.

And it’s called?

malware is probably the best known case of this

Today the profile just 404s

https://github.com/malware

edit: yep this is his account

And Mike Alware is still salty about it.

More likely Malcolm Ware?

What was the username?

As charcircuit figured out, the username is/was `malware`. They deactivated it in 2018 without any explanation, and even my contacts at Github at the time couldn't quite figure out why it was happening.

My only thought was that it was during the MSFT acquisition due diligence, and my username was an unfortunate victim of whatever compliance requirements they had to satisfy.

Honestly the url does not look good. I can see why they wouldn't want it showing up in logs or across the internet. Maybe it was getting hit by virus scanners or other Internet filtering as well.

Sounds like a believable explanation.

> I created my account two years ago in anticipation of being able to open-source more code and I wanted to reserve my name; I had a couple of forked repos but that's it.

Policy on this seems to have shifted in the last 1-2 years.

I’ve asked personally in the last 12 months for a couple situations and been declined by GitHub Support.

Looking quickly on Reddit mine isn’t an unusual experience.

It was good while it lasted!

Same experience for me. 3 years ago I was able to claim an inactive username (the actual process was that you filed a complaint about an inactive user, they renamed the account, then said "it's available now, good luck you better be quick", so it was not an official transfer process).

Tried again about 12 months ago for a different username/org and was told this is no longer possible.

Yeah, sounds like GitHub doesn't let people squat usernames.

The author says GitHub can 'modify his repos at will', but earlier he says he doesn't even have any repos besides a few forks (which were likely not modified)

The problem was that this process was handled very poorly by their support team years ago. No notification or any kind of communication with the original owner. What seemed to you inactive could have been still an active user. This happened to me. It seems that after the Microsoft acquisition things may have improved and they don’t enforce the name squatting policy as easily as before.

That happened to me too, I was able to secure our organization's name that way. There was someone squatting on it, and it could have caused potential problems if they started uploading code. From what I recall about the process, it was pretty straightforward - I sent an email and just a few minutes later, I had the username linked to me.

Same here, not sure if they still list it but GitHub had a name-squatting policy on their site, and after referencing that in an email to support, requesting a username of someone who only had a handful of repos about 8 years ago, they released the username to the public so I could switch to it.

I did this (request an inactive name) for a username many years ago, which led to people scraping my personal email from commits, and using information I used in my readme to contact me and ask for it. “It’s my real name” and other stories.

I almost gave it away the first time, but the person wouldn’t provide proof of it being their name. Future requests made me realize it was just a coveted username

Any idea if they still grant requests like this? There are some pretty nice usernames taken by completely empty accounts.

Same story here

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