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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

I recently tried to access someone at github.

A page ( https://github.com/pricing , I am a verified teacher, what happens if I already subscribed to co-pilot ) clearly tells me to contact support. I've decided it's simply impossible to contact anyone at github, every attempt just leads to an automated reply and my post being closed. I'm not sure there is anyone there. I tried posting ont he help forum, where I (of course) never got a reply.

This has made me make sure nothing I care about is only on github -- as I don't expect to any recieve any help if I have any other problems in future. I should of course be careful anyway, but when you hit these problems you realise quite how hard it is to contact any modern large company.

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It’s impossible to get them to respond to my emails with a paid account. I have an enterprise account with a dedicated rep. To increase the number of seats on your contract you have to request that they do it. I had run out of seats and with a new dev starting it took a few days and emails to get the guy to do anything. I’m try to give you MORE money and it’s like pulling teeth. They’re my only option with Gitlab’s insane price increase.

Why do people use it at all over companies that have an incentive to offer and maintain a superior cloud product?

Like why not Dropbox or Sync?

Many companies already pay for Google Workspace so Google Drive is included.

And for personal use, it's much cheaper than Dropbox.

I pay R$6.99/month for 100GB of Google storage (most of which is used by Google Photos), while Dropbox costs R$10/month for 50GB of storage and doesn't integrate very well with Google Photos.

Not to be glib, but this episode is a little reminder of why that's not always the case. Priceless data now lost (if it is in fact conclusively/irreoverably lost) demonstrates that sometimes in life, its the free or cheap things that end up costing us the most :(

Wait, GitHub doesn’t respond to support requests any more?

I’ve contacted them many times in the past (before MS acquisition), and every time I got a non-template response from a human being within a few hours, sometimes within half an hour. Example request: pushed something I later regretted, asked them to gc on the server and purge cached pages; I asked this a couple of times and had it promptly taken care of each time.

If you want to contact someone at github, you have to write a good blog post about your issue and get it on HN front page

In the past GitHub had a specific forum that worked outside of GitHub itself, and at that forum it wasn't hard to get attention from actual GitHub employees, but since they transitioned to the generic Discussion in the feedback repository, closing the old forums, it's got to the new state of things where it's impossible to talk with people from there.

I had the opposite experience. Github only recognised my institutions student e-mail domain, not our institutional one that instructors and staff use. So I couldn't sign up as an instructor for the educational stuff.

I sent in a tech support request, and it was solved in less than 2 hours. They even replied, telling me they added my institutional e-mail domain.

So not only did a human reply and fix my problem, I'm not even a paying customer. I get the free education account.

Usually the way to go is to come to places like here and get the attention of an employee who is dawdling on HN not working, or Twitter/X.

Maybe someone from MSFT/GitHub can help

I think above a certain threshold every company stops answering in person, and that threshold keeps being pushed down.

I have a completely free, unpaid GitHub account and have always had my support requests answered by a human in less than 24 hours

I tried to contact Github for a GDPR complaint, and received only an automated message. If they don't respond in a month then I get the legal right to sue them, but it will have to get in line behind AWS.

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