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It all started roughly two days ago when I was greeted with the following after trying to login to my account:
So what ToS did I violate? I have no clue. But regardless, this article isn't about my mysterious ban, it's about the complete disastrous way the entire situation was carried out by GitHub instead.
Prior to this I did not receive any warnings or any explanation of what specifically I have violated in the ToS. And mind you, GitHub's ToS isn't some tiny 10 liner (I have skimmed through it, along with their privacy policy, way before this incident).
Telling the user that they've been banned for "violating ToS" is the same as arresting someone and citing "breaking the law" as a reason. It's functionally the same as not giving any reason at all.
And this situation is especially frustrating, if the ban happened to be some false-positive ban, as you'd be left scratching your head (like me) with no clue what ToS exactly you've violated.
Even if you're a blissful soul who thinks github doesn't have any false positive bans, and everyone getting banned doesn't deserve to know why, and you're a perfect being who would never face such a situation... You're still not safe.
When I said "suspended" I wasn't just talking about my account being affected. No, every single Issues/Comments/Pull-requests opened by my account all got silently WIPED without any notice. So even if you don't do anything wrong, you may wake up one day and find that:
The list goes on, you get the idea. Even if we assume that the user did do something wrong and deserved to banned, what's the justification for the havoc this is going to cause to the other developers, who now have to suffer the consequence?
The way GitHub is banning it's user isn't just a silent kidnap and execute. No, it's a reckless brushfire with absolutely no regards to any of the bystanders who are also getting shot.
Unrelated, but I found it funny how even at the face of getting your existence wiped, you still can't escape the buggy, unreliable, shitty mess that is modern software.
This used to have around 15 open issues before the wipe, now there's only 5 (I'm sure that the other developers of this project deserved to get their issue tracker, with valuable technical discussion I might add, wiped silently!).
However notice at the top how the pinned issue escaped the eraser :)
(The link does 404 upon clicking though.)
As I was writing this article, I came across another bug. My code review on this PR got wiped. But notice how the "conversation" tab still says "14 comments" :)
Public trust in Github has been rather low and under decline given the following events:
[0]: I should probably clarify that I'm not Russian, have never been to Russia, and have no affiliation with any Russian orgs. So the reason of my ban is probably not that.
[0]: After revisiting this article, I just noticed that there's been an update which states:
According to him (Martin Woodward, the Senior Director of Developer Relations at GitHub), the only mechanism GitHub previously had to suspend accounts was built to target spammers and other malicious actors — scenarios in which, usually, the best thing to is make the accounts and all activity entirely disappear.
This makes matters worse. Because this update was posted at April 21, 2022. Which means It's been over a month, and GitHub still hasn't resolved the issue and is perfectly fine with wiping accounts with no regards towards the various other developers who are getting negatively affected by this reckless action.
It's been roughly 48 hours since I've opened a support ticket (ID: 1656025). So far I still haven't gotten any replies.
But regardless of what happens to my account, and even if GitHub were to grant me permanent immunity from bans, moving forward it's still going to be hard if not impossible for me (and anyone else affected by this I assume) to trust GitHub as a development service since any of the Pull-requests, Issues, valuable comments of YOUR project's repository can get wiped at any moment without any notice or care regardless of if YOU've done anything wrong or not.
Did I mention that I had previously skimmed though the GitHub's ToS ?
GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately.
As of today, roughly two weeks later, I've (finally) gotten an email from GitHub support saying that they've reinstated my account. After asking why it was banned to begin with, I was told it was related to my email address.
About an year ago, while I was looking for an alternative to Gmail, I used a cock.li email temporarily for about a week or two (this was back when they weren't invite-only). After I found an email provider I liked (disroot), I moved over and forgot all about the cock.li account.
I'm not sure why this triggered a ban on GitHub an year later. I didn't ask weather the ban was automatic or manual (as I didn't think it mattered much) but I presume that they've recently started auto-flagging all suspicious emails and I happened to got caught in it.
But in any case, everything I've said in this article still remains valid. Specifically:
One good thing that came out of this situation is that at least one project (nsxiv) has switched over it's development away from GitHub and to a libre platform, CodeBerg.
I think more libre projects should follow suit and consider hosting themselves at libre platforms and make sure that they do not depend on proprietary services.
Anyhow this concludes the end of this story. And speaking of libre platforms, I might do a write-up on my experience using CodeBerg soon™️.
