Spam detection is far from perfect. The "error" message seemed incredibly friendly (it made me smile), the support guy was nice and as helpful as he could be, and they fixed it right away. Something triggered their alerts, and they temporarily locked down your account. The alternative is thousands of spam bots running amok.
It's not ideal, and maybe a warning would have been nice... however, I feel like GitHub handled it way better than most other sites would. If this happened to me, I would have had no complaints.
Same. The author's "completely lost my trust" feels unwarranted. With all data still accessible and a resolution protocol clearly presented, I'd tout this as an example of a good policy. I wish other sites/organizations would learn from Github and handle cases like this so clearly and promptly.
Now I'm sure I would still feel inconvenienced for this having happened at all, but again, with things presented so clearly, it falls into my "well, shit happens" bucket rather than the "I am morally outraged and cannot conceive how this would ever occur!" bucket.
Maybe it's because I can conceive how this would occur? Having only tangentially worked with a few such systems (e.g. identifying bot behavior), false positives come with the territory and so I've got some empathy for the Customer Support reps who have to deal with the fallout from edge cases in such a system.
Feels a lot like having a credit card get locked while traveling (which I have had happen despite notifying the issuer of impending travel). That is, a system which helps in most cases wound up classifying me as a different-from-most case. That's going to keep happening throughout my life. It's part of the automation-assisted world we live in.
The question is how Github handles these cases, and I think they did fine.
Comments
Spam detection is far from perfect. The "error" message seemed incredibly friendly (it made me smile), the support guy was nice and as helpful as he could be, and they fixed it right away. Something triggered their alerts, and they temporarily locked down your account. The alternative is thousands of spam bots running amok.
It's not ideal, and maybe a warning would have been nice... however, I feel like GitHub handled it way better than most other sites would. If this happened to me, I would have had no complaints.
Same. The author's "completely lost my trust" feels unwarranted. With all data still accessible and a resolution protocol clearly presented, I'd tout this as an example of a good policy. I wish other sites/organizations would learn from Github and handle cases like this so clearly and promptly.
Now I'm sure I would still feel inconvenienced for this having happened at all, but again, with things presented so clearly, it falls into my "well, shit happens" bucket rather than the "I am morally outraged and cannot conceive how this would ever occur!" bucket.
Maybe it's because I can conceive how this would occur? Having only tangentially worked with a few such systems (e.g. identifying bot behavior), false positives come with the territory and so I've got some empathy for the Customer Support reps who have to deal with the fallout from edge cases in such a system.
Feels a lot like having a credit card get locked while traveling (which I have had happen despite notifying the issuer of impending travel). That is, a system which helps in most cases wound up classifying me as a different-from-most case. That's going to keep happening throughout my life. It's part of the automation-assisted world we live in.
The question is how Github handles these cases, and I think they did fine.