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Comment on GitHub Thinks I'm a Robot

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I once triggered this by pasting a very, very long URL into a gist. It's unsettling realizing that your entire identity can be turned off at the flick of a switch.

It's hard to think of a better way to handle this. Github's current behavior is to remove your account from public view until it can be determined your account wasn't compromised. During this time, you can still push to your repos and do any other write operation. Another way to handle this would be to make your account read-only without hiding anything. The latter is objectively worse: imagine suddenly not being able to do anything.

Gitlab is quite pleasant nowadays, so that's an option.

The whole point of distributed version control is that if Github shuts down (or locks you out), you can still do your work.

Them making your account read-only should not lead to you not being able to do anything.

Certainly, but many companies have centralized around Github to the point that it's integrated into their workflows (e.g. deployment).

Github has a clear resolution policy, and by the author's account they were also quite responsive, even on a weekend. If a temporary user account issue completely destroys the ability of a professional team at a company to interact with their production system, is it Github's fault, or is it the company's for not having a backup method of interacting with something so critical?

I like Continuous Delivery systems as much as anyone, but if something in that pipeline broke and it perfectly lined up with an everything-is-on-fire moment where I needed to deploy a hotfix? I'd just run my tests manually and deploy directly.

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