Tell HN: GitHub suspended my account without warning or explanation
I created a static website writing guides and documenting some of my findings there (in Persian). I used Actions and Pages to build the website and I hosted the source on Github itself.
After a while, I was suddenly suspended without a single warning or giving any explanation except a generic terms of use violation!
I asked for reinstatement 3 times in 2 weeks, none of them were answered.
After about a month, I pinged them on Twitter. A day later, finally someone replied to my reinstatement ticket, saying I was using Github Actions "to interact with 3rd party websites, to engage in incentivized activities,..." which was against the terms.
Thing is, I was not using Actions for such activities. I only used it (with Hugo) to build the static website!
I asked them to tell me exactly what repository was violating this rule. Someone replied:
"After further investigation of this particular account, we’ve determined that the account will need to remain flagged."
They completely ignore telling me what exact thing I did that resulted in this ban. Also, shouldn't there be, like, a "warning", issued to the account owner so he has the opportunity to remove the offending content before a ban out of the blue?
I was lucky that I had a copy of the tree locally. I licked my wounds, moved the repo to Codeberg [1] and used its static hosting feature. Unfortunately, I was getting lots of 500 errors from their hosting server so I had to yet again migrate the public folder to Netlify [2].
In summary:
- All my comments, issues and commit info are shadowed! Feel weird.
- I lost a gist file which was an English translation of a Chinese blog about a circumvention method. It took me a couple of hours to create that and I was trying to trust in the C L O U D for once and used gist instead of usual git for that. They don't allow me to download it.
- I lost a gitignored todo file containing bookmarks and lots of information gathered (mistakenly removed by me locally).
- My original github page domain name was circulating in social media and telegram groups. After the ban, users received 404, and never returned. (The content is not even popular though. My guides were more suitable for debugging and notes for Linux environments).
- Like, 90% of the people active in this space are using Github. I'm essentially banished from a whole technical field! And I was someone who was saying people protesting the centralization of FOSS development are exaggerating. Lesson learned I guess.
I can only guess why they flagged it. I had an XMR donation address (lots of random strings) in my profile. Maybe that triggered it? Also I might have starred or forked a repo that was hosting v2ray on external serverless services. I'm not sure about it. But I have never used or enabled Actions on it.
So if anyone from Github is seeing this, please issue warnings and give exact explanations before abruptly banning people.
[1]: https://codeberg.org/Azadzadeh/iran-internet
[2]: https://iran-internet.netlify.app/