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I don't think there's anything "special" here. You have the same problem currently where finding the canonical location of a repository is done via some out-of-band social network or website.

On GitHub, you also can look at the stars to give you extra confidence, and on Radicle the equivalent is the seed count for a given repository.

Then why does the documentation say this is "important"? GitHub certainly does not have a notice anywhere saying "it's important to only publish repositories you own or are a maintainer of" (...well, I guess it could be buried deep in some user guide I never read, lol).

I think it's currently more likely to happen on Radicle given there is no search or discovery functionality, and repositories exist on a flat hierarchy, ie. they are not namespaced by user/org name, so harder to distinguish if they share the same name and description.

Why are those items not included? Being able to browse one org/developer's repos is a very useful indicator when investigating a new unknown repo/project/org/person, trying to determine if the risk of time investment is worth the effort.

Maybe Kagi could add this to their custom index.

> putting random little "please for the love of all that is holy don't do X as it will cause problems for other users" notices in the documentation or even as interstitial UI (!!) of my products and watching everyone immediately do exactly that thing as no one reads or thinks (or even cares)--a large number of people aren't going to honor this request in the documentation

Kind of off topic, but you shouldn't get annoyed at people for ignoring your notices and not reading the docs. It's an extremely logical thing to do. Think about it - how many notices do you see in a typical day of computing? Probably dozens. How many tools to you use? Also dozens. Now imagine how long it would take if you read all of those notices, and exhaustively read the documentation for every tool. Too fucking long!

It's much better to use heuristics and not read. For example if you close a document and you've made unsaved changes to it, you know the dialog is going to be "Do you want to discard it?". There's no point reading it.

This is a good thing!!

So the conclusion is that you should design your software with the knowledge that people behave this way. It is usually possible to do so. If you give a concrete example I can probably suggest a better solution than "asking and hoping they read it".

I spoke in the past tense, and already learned this lesson back 20 years ago; you can tell that I believe software can and should be coded to avoid such issues from the position I took with my comment: that it was concerning that the software would stop working not if but when people do not read this "important" notice. Although, maybe you didn't actually bother to read the rest of my comment, and so failed to appreciate my actual point, given how you just quoted something near the beginning which was mere evidence and focused on it with what feels a bit like an axe to grind ;P.

Which, though, leads me to something I will say in response to your reframing: while I do believe that one must build systems with the understanding that people will not read any of the documentation, we should still judge people for the behavior. I am pro commingled recycling, and yet I also believe that people who don't even try to read the signs on top of a series of trash bins are shirking a duty they have to not be a jerk, the same way we should be angry at people for not knowing local laws even if we put them on giant signs on the street as they'd rather just be lazy.

Isn't the github way of doing things: You add a copyright notice to your code, identifying your repository as the source, and changing the copyright is illegal? That would be applicable to this as well.