I can no longer have any account on GitHub, new accounts that I create are hunted and suspended.
I tried appealing the ban, and months have passed with no response from support.
This means that GitHub has effectively suspended my ability to participate in the development community, and also I cannot work as well, because my company uses GitHub, and as soon as GitHub finds out that a account is used by me, the account is immediately banned under the justification that it is being used to sidestep a decision.
I don’t know what to do anymore, I’m afraid, I’m going to be fired if I can’t work, what I’m going to do?
Edit: this thread is flagged, did I do anything wrong? Should I change something, or delete it?
Make a new account from a fresh email and you are probably good to go.
How would they know it is you? If you use your work email, yeah, you have to ask your employer to give you another one. But is that so hard?
If the permaban is appropriate is a different discussion. Without seeing that comment that go you banned, it's impossible to say.
When you need github access to have so many jobs, it starts to reach the point where basically no comment should result in a permanent ban.
"They are a private company and can ban whoever they want"...
OK, and suddenly you find yourself banned for expressing an opinion which totally fits with your own ideology and which you thought was the epitome of virtue. You just forgot the company got bought and the new management follows a different ideology. Is the company still right in their decision to ban you? If not, why not?
Systems in use at several Big Tech companies can cross check any number of (meta) data attached to the account, resulting in flagged accounts and possibly even automated bans.
This is the reason that at least some permanently banned people on Twitter need to use VPN, a new name/bio and a burner phone to create and maintain a new account. Using a IP address used to access the old one and/or the same phone number and/or the same or a very similar name/bio (probably using a Levenshtein like algo to check similarity) automatically flags the new account.
Whether or not the comment warrants a permaban or not, I’d gladly delete it, avoid the behavior in the future, and also clearly regret it!
IP? Unlikely. You probably do not use a static IP that only you use, right?
Your ssh keys? Delete them.
Cookies? Delete them.
Fingerprint? Use a different browser to find out.
Etc etc.
If you are not too technically versed, maybe start from a fresh computer.
Work domain.
Work projects.
Browser fingerprinting.
Vscode telemetry data.
Windows telemetry data.
There are lots of ways to track it, and probably there’s a machine learning algorithm that helps it, because every time I find a loophole, when I’m suspended again the loophole stops working.
If you are using a service for work, you should not be expected to maintain a direct relationship with them. It's on your employer to negotiate account creation, terms of use, payment, banning or whatever else. This is exactly how something like, say, Slack works.
For example Google.
I have the same issue with Reddit. I can create an account on a different email and use it fine for a few days and then boom. But I stopped using it on anything I am logged into my Google account with and it's been fine for months.
What do you access Github on? I would create a separate user profile for work. Do not log into any services such as Google on it that Github have linked to you and you should be fine.
I have a different account that I use on a work computer, I ended up posting in that same subreddit without realising my original account was banned (hadn't logged into it and noticed that was the case)
Reddit Perm banned both accounts for ban evasion and for awhile any other account I made, even though i did nothing wrong or didn't post on that subreddit again, until I made sure to use completely clean profiles whenever I want to use reddit.
Annoying.
Nowadays. The comments on Reddit are GPT3. No real users comment anymore. Next year. This will be an issue. Now, it’s just a experiment Reddit is running before IPO.
Inversely, it would be interesting to see what the result is if the ban was not following the contract and terms of use but just the choice of an individual moderator. I don't know how much wiggle room they have to make such choices.
I’m thinking of suing a distributor or the local Microsoft subsidiary.
Perhaps we should simply not be building organisational dependencies on this product.
But the ban is forever, there is zero transparency, and no appeal.
But in other countries, is more complicated than that.
In Brazil, those kinds of bans behaviors are not ok under consumer protection laws, and also their TOS where they don’t guarantee anything even for paid accounts is definitely not ok and suable for damages if something happens.
The identity working with the code doesn't have to match the code.
Are you saying they will ban some "foo" account if it pushes code into a repo where some of the commits are authored by some user "Non Grata <bar@whatever.com>"?
Or how does it work?
> This means that GitHub has effectively suspended my ability to participate in the development community, and also I cannot work as well, because my company uses GitHub
> I don’t know what to do anymore, I’m afraid, I’m going to be fired if I can’t work
You'll have to have a discussion with your employer/manager about why you can't use github any more.
(Partly out of sheer curiosity and partly so I can avoid this myself, as I also have a habit of making somewhat feisty comments, when I'm off my meds and in a bit of an obsessive rage about something.)
Mail me at my username at duck.com and I’ll send you the handles of the account, you can search GitHub yourself. Some threads were deleted though.
Get a new email address.
Use a clean/new browser profile.
Create a new github account.
If that doesn't work, I'm curious to know how Github connects the accounts to the same person.
Use a VPN and perhaps get a different computer or use a different browser in case they've fingerprinted it. That seems like a lot of effort for GitHub to go to but I guess it's not impossible.
I'm not exactly sure how it works. But Reddit has banned my accounts whenever I make a new one and i've deleted all of my Reddit cookies, they somehow find me.
The only contact information I can find is this email for privacy requests, which should be good enough, they have to process legal requests they receive privacy@github.com
For Microsoft there is this Page https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/policies AskCELA@microsoft.com
It's not clear from your messages whether you are a subscriber or your organization is a subscriber or both or neither. This affects how to access support and escalate and what claims you may have (your company should have a contract with access to enterprise support if they are customers).
It's not reasonable for GitHub to ban you with no justification and no recourse and make you lose your job.
Get a lawyer yourself. Or get your company to escalate through their support channel or legal.
Warning: We only have one side of the story. If you were posting abusive messages to Github in your name and/or in the company name, on company time. The company may review the messages and may find them abusive too and may fire you.
Msft said it was a GitHub decision, they can’t interfere.
EDIT: After more digging, I found the contact, the terms of services here https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... are linking to this legal section here https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/g... that contains address and email for legal requests. This is incorrectly put in a page "Guidelines for Legal Requests of User Data" but it's not about data request, it's for all legal requests.
A lot of people are saying that GitHub is a company, and that it has absolutely no responsibility to do business with the OP; they had the terms and they didn't follow them, end of story. Now put yourself in their shoes. There is a service that you use for work, and that you are not paying for. You do something wrong with the service - or maybe you didn't, what does it matter? - and you're banned. You are unable to do your job and you might be fired due to this. You ask for an explanation, or at least for a second chance, and are given no response. Who's at fault? The crux of the problem is related to quite a few issues, things that shouldn't be happening.
- GitHub basically entirely controls the market for the space it's in, giving the OP little alternatives to get a different job.
- GitHub does not have the time to respond to OP's support ticket but they do have the resources to overzealously ban them
Why is it like this? Yes, GitHub has no legal obligation to respond to OP, and that's tough luck for them. This really lends itself to the issue of GitHub being essentially a monopoly. It's the same thing with Google, Facebook, etc.; they all offer essential services that nobody else offers, and if they shut you out, it's over for you. GitHub has no legal obligation to do anything for OP, but the real problem is that they do not have any financial obligation to do anything. There's no alternative, nobody's just going to shift to GitLab; no matter how much GitHub fucks up, they have nothing to lose.
Another problem is the absurdity of the rules (although I obviously do not have full knowledge of what OP did and they could be leaving out important elements of the story) on sites like this. GitHub is a site for programming; why is it their place to moderate things from a social perspective? But that's a whole different story.
What I'm trying to say here is, the real problem is that there exist single companies that are allowed to destroy your life for any reason they want, without any retaliation or retribution. Your life could depend on single companies, with no alternatives. To me, it seems almost like a dystopian scenario.
The same goes for centralized social media. Moderation on Twitter and Youtube has been politically important recently not because there aren't other options for microblogging or video hosting with adequate functionality, but because they have the vast majority of the audience for that kind of content.
I'm hoping people are starting to realize these monopolies are harmful and moving to more diversified options.
> why is it their place to moderate things from a social perspective?
The purpose of moderation is to prevent people from abandoning the platform because it's full of behavior or content they deem unacceptable. Most services don't want to take positions on social issues, but if discussions in open source projects on GitHub are full of slurs, threats, suggestions that people should kill themselves, and the like, people will stop using it.
Or find an employer that does not require github which is like 99% of employers.
Apparently your username is a Portuguese psychological term that means self-reflection, that is cool. But maybe expand outside that.
But I must respectfully note, I think if you're asking for help to circumvent a punishment by GitHub, one needs to know what the nature of the "controversy" was. There are certainly some 'controversial' viewpoints that are vile enough that I'd rather not help someone who had their views.
I respect that you're in a sticky wicket. But this seems no different from pre-Internet times when one might lose their job from insulting a close vendor or client your employer works with. Imagine you were in a bar in a one-company town talking about a sexual conquest, only to turn around and see your employer, who reveals your conquest was a 20-something child of theirs. Your choice at that point is pretty much to move.
You failed to have the self-awareness that you were in a venue that could affect your livelihood and made a mistake so significant that it can't be retracted or made up. That has happened both off the Internet and on it since time immemorial.
The question you are asking now is not how to handle the situation, but how to continue the behavior of disguising yourself to circumvent the punishment. I think that (a) is a question that shows you are not owning up to your behavior (which itself is problematic); and (b) is the wrong strategy to take in this situation, because any circumvention or working outside the GitHub system is _conceivably_ fragile and could collapse at any point, leaving you with the same problem once more.
My own suggestion - and I make this with reluctance not knowing whether the 'controversy' is something vile - would be to do two things. Both would be extremely hard.
First, I would approach your HR contact, apologize for your conduct with the most remorse you can demonstrate, and see if their person/contact (sales, support, whatever) at GitHub can help you in this situation. Assuming they want to keep you, they can even say to GitHub, "Look, we want to keep this person employed, what can you do for us? Can you provide an ability to commit code without commenting ability?" Etc.
Second, pursuing that guidance separately, I would see if anyone here, or any personal or professional contact of yours (cf. LinkedIn, etc.), has any contact at GitHub, or any friend-of-a-friend at GitHub, etc., so that you can speak with someone personally.
Certainly the repeated attempts (and deletions) at circumvention likely are not doing anything but racking up points on the 'don't let this guy back in' meter, whether that's automated or not.
Lest you think I am unsympathetic, I once made a decision that might've potentially locked me out of a great deal of future employment. I truly believe what made the difference in that situation was that I owned up to my error and looked the wronged parties in the eye and apologized directly. I explained the human factors leading me to make the wrong decision, while explicitly saying it didn't excuse the mistake. Humility is rare enough in today's world that it can oft make a difference.
I wish you luck in your resolution of this issue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33577471
They were not offensive, they were not disrespectful, they were actually valid complaints, and I also used to participate a lot, and since people echoed the comments, they were considered ‘disruptive’.
People that support non-discrimination should consider moving their repositories to smaller providers.
I would suggest that you talk to your manager. If your company pays for GitHub, hopefully they can get in touch with support and/or a sales rep and get it sorted.
On the other hand, maybe Github has enough on its plate not to bother trying and they just blanket ban on a significant enough red flag.
> and as soon as GitHub finds out that a account is used by me
How does that happen; what sort of fingerprinting are they going by?
Sheesh, what happened to hackers … ?
