Tell HN:GitHub can remove issues at any time | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN:GitHub can remove issues at any time

7 pointskarussell5 comments

I'm one of the maintainers of the open source routing engine GraphHopper. The project is around 6k stars so not that small and also we have private repositories and pay Github a monthly fee for this.

We recently found that one of our longer issues disappeared:

https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/issues/446

See this archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20241112051113/https://github.co...

I contacted Github and they wrote: I can confirm that the issue isn't a technical problem on GitHub's side, but is related to the user status of the creator of this issue. For privacy reasons, I cannot share additional details without permission from the user in question, though.

I ask them why they don't handle it like reddit does (just removing the comment content and the user name), but they say they can't do this:

Unfortunately this is not something we can do at this time, because as soon as the affected user will fix their account, all of the dat related to them will be visible again.

I still don't understand why they can't do it like reddit and also don't understand what this means and the ticket is closed now.

With a script we found 3 more such removed issues, but those don't have an entry in archive.org and are now lost.

This is concerning that in order to have a properly functioning open source hosting we would have to archive regularly.

What would you do?

Another GraphHopper dev here. This is quite odd. Github users should not be able to delete comments of others by simply deleting their account, even for issues they opened themselves.

A guess: You could be seeing a side effect of laws that require companies to remove all of a user’s “data” upon request.

They may have been legally obligated in some jurisdiction.

Unfortunately under these laws the issue isn’t yours or your projects. It was the users.

There are a lot of unintended side effects like this.

Yeah, my guess is that they implemented some EU regulation very lazily.

> Unfortunately under these laws the issue isn’t yours or your projects. It was the users.

Are you sure? How it comes reddit implemented this differently?

The argument that the issues is owned by the creator might be true, but on the other hand the user creates the issue at a "foreign" project and knows that they don't "own" this conversation. Especially the comments in these issues are not "owned" by the issue creator. This does not make any sense, especially as it is a public issue.

> Are you sure? How it comes reddit implemented this differently?

User data removal requests are handled separately from user initiated account deletion. On Reddit you can find old threads where all of one person’s posts are removed.

> but on the other hand the user creates the issue at a "foreign" project and knows that they don't "own" this conversation.

Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what you, I, or the user thinks is right at time of creation.

The only thing that matters is what the law says or implies. Users who invoke these laws often no longer care or even feel like they’re doing a good thing by hurting the original site in removing something they created.

> This is concerning that in order to have a properly functioning open source hosting we would have to archive regularly.

This has been the case always. Remember when SourceForge would inject adware into the installers? It's just a fact that when you're using a thirdparty's server to host your stuff, you cannot completely control what you're hosting. You're at the mercy of the thirdparty.

It's no excuse for GitHub deleting something you took the time and effort to write and share with the world for free. But with enshittification and all, I don't know if we can ever expect fair treatment anymore.

For total control you're going to need to host stuff on your server or put everything like issues, pr comments, wiki into your Git repo. Fossil does it. But git doesn't, at least not yet.

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