I understand that fighting spam is difficult; I ran public email servers for years, and I think that Github does a great job at it.
My gripe here is that they didn't notify me before or after hiding my account. I don't expect a human to review the flag and I'm not suggesting they do. I agree, that doesn't scale. But it doesn't take a human to send me an email that says "Your account has been flagged for spam. Please contact support to resolve this issue."
The issue is that if I hadn't happened to log in this morning I would not have known that my account was hidden until I started getting complaints about broken links. Github was returning 404 errors for my repos. That means no one could download code or releases, read Wikis, file Issues, etc. It was like the repos had just been deleted.
My projects are pretty small, comparatively. But imagine if you went to read some docs on Angular or Express or any other large, open source project and you just got a 404 for the entire project? It's pretty scary.
My only ask here is that they notify users that they flag. Nothing more. I think it's a pretty reasonable request. I have since exchanged a couple more emails with them and they have said they'll raise the issue internally.
That is something to which you at least deserve an answer to, though i expect they don't do it because sending out that email would alert the owner of the bot which would otherwise never be any wiser. It's a cousin of hellbanning, something which even HN does.
Though i think it's also fair to point out that your post only raises that issue as an aside, while that is the most salient thing in it.
Also, a bit of github background: Personal accounts are meant for small personal things. They expect anything big and important to happen in organizations, which i suppose are treated slightly differently.
Comments
I understand that fighting spam is difficult; I ran public email servers for years, and I think that Github does a great job at it.
My gripe here is that they didn't notify me before or after hiding my account. I don't expect a human to review the flag and I'm not suggesting they do. I agree, that doesn't scale. But it doesn't take a human to send me an email that says "Your account has been flagged for spam. Please contact support to resolve this issue."
The issue is that if I hadn't happened to log in this morning I would not have known that my account was hidden until I started getting complaints about broken links. Github was returning 404 errors for my repos. That means no one could download code or releases, read Wikis, file Issues, etc. It was like the repos had just been deleted.
My projects are pretty small, comparatively. But imagine if you went to read some docs on Angular or Express or any other large, open source project and you just got a 404 for the entire project? It's pretty scary.
My only ask here is that they notify users that they flag. Nothing more. I think it's a pretty reasonable request. I have since exchanged a couple more emails with them and they have said they'll raise the issue internally.
Ah, i did not realize they did not email you.
That is something to which you at least deserve an answer to, though i expect they don't do it because sending out that email would alert the owner of the bot which would otherwise never be any wiser. It's a cousin of hellbanning, something which even HN does.
Though i think it's also fair to point out that your post only raises that issue as an aside, while that is the most salient thing in it.
Also, a bit of github background: Personal accounts are meant for small personal things. They expect anything big and important to happen in organizations, which i suppose are treated slightly differently.