Github banned me for no understandable reason

This title is explosive, so I'll not bury the lede because I respect your time.

I'm not a Github power user or anything, but it's impossible to not transact with Github for open source projects.

Hints #

I had a hint before I got suspended that suggests something might have upset Github, but I didn't get a notification for what was wrong for these either.

When I did code search, occasionally my search would be blocked because my account was "flagged":

And that was weird... and annoying. But surely, Github would send me an email to let me know what's up?

So I don't question it, leave it for weeks, thinking that it'll resolve itself.

Getting suspended #

And then on April 3rd, I noticed that github.com brings me to the homepage instead of the dashboard, thinking that I simply just had my cookies expire....

Yep...?

I check my email:

They sure have my right email when it's about money.... They banned me without as much as sending me an eviction notice.

None is there to help #

The support process is miserable.

Github's entire support is built around the expectation you have an account.

... Including suspensions, that contact support link in the suspension dialog will send you first to https://support.github.com/contact/reinstatement, then to https://support.github.com/request/landing
Which will ask you to sign into your Github account....

So you go to Can't sign in or don't have an account.

Which brings you this page (that's begging for padding) asking for your email and a captcha.

This gives you a verification code, which allows you to temporarily access to the support dashboard.

For my case, I needed to provide a phone number once I was there (including another captcha):

What does all this friction get you? Getting ghosted for almost a month:

I know some friends who would be unable to work at their actual jobs if this happened to them.

I started to get impatient at the lack of response, and I was also looking to contribute to a few repositories at that time, so I sent another reply and got nothing back.

I still don't have a reply as of writing.

The damage #

Everything I did on Github is simply gone. #

I don't want this to come off as egoistic, but I have done a good amount of activity on Github. I wrote comments, I filed issues for projects (because I want to make them better).

As of writing, it's simply gone: https://github.com/regalialong

My pull requests are gone too, simply as if they never existed, including all the discussions on why things were written that way.

I can't describe in words to how bad this is, how bad this makes me feel, ego wise and collaboration wise.

Mind you, this is solved, Github moves activity from deleted accounts to the ghost account to keep history in tact, but they clearly never do this for suspensions (which would be fine for spam).

Github can only get away with this because they hold a majority of the git forge market, but Github allows you to search public code they store globally.

And you know what? This is great! I'd argue this is something that makes me a better developer, if there's a constant I'm uncertain about, or if there's something I'm not sure what the syntax or the structure to code it with is, I can just look it up.

I'm missing this more often than I'd like to admit, and repos themselves you can clone them and grep against them, you're not allowed to code search at all unauthenticated.

I can't use Github Sponsors #

I don't have to go into length for this, Github Sponsors allows you to donate developers money straight from the platform.

I gave Github my credit card details to support the work that I benefit from, and by extension their platform.

Tauon is my favorite music player and I want to give its developer money as thanks for the work (and you know, so they can afford food and coffee).

Github is at least gracious enough to let you embed other platforms for supporting devs, but this still sucks for those devs who only take Github.

HACS depends on Github authentication #

I use Home Assistant, which is a Smart Home platform thing. Instead of having five million vendor specific hardware devices for managing a Smart Home, HA wants to defeat xkc 927.

It's great, but the open secret about HA that a lot of the value is also because you can install other community integrations into it.
A cool project to show off as example is Adaptive Lighting, which adjusts the temperature of your lights based on the sun's position at your location.
But it's also menial work, like bringing not natively (or poorly) supported devices into Home Assistant, tuya-local comes to mind.

To install things not shipped by HA, you need to download the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS).
But HACS is built entirely on Github, which means their app depends entirely on being able to do Github OAuth with your account, including updates.

This sucks. I can't get updates. This is unusable for me.

I can't download Artifacts or read CI logs #

Developers might require you to download a unversioned build from CI so you can test if new changes work.
You can't download artifacts without an account (the link for the file isn't clickable):

Thankfully https://nightly.link/ exists to bypass this issue for developers who care to set it up, but not all developers do, so you're just locked out of downloading builds.

You also can't view CI logs (to prevent spam maybe???) without an account:

The section to check the logs of the jobs don't expand. You can't even externally help with CI issues that way.......

Reverse engineering what Github might dislike about me #

I have a few things that might have stepped out of line, and I'm not entirely convinced about any of them since Github hasn't sent me any explanation.

I wrote some Adblocker cosmetic filters #

There's one example I can think of that they dislike that might have been egregious, I wrote some cosmetic filters for blocking the Copilot Chat in the Dashboard back when they haven't provided a toggle to disable it (do Control + F for "regalialong"). This is an Internet Archive link, because that comment plus the thread of people contributing their own filters, is gone.

I also wrote some filterlists to declutter VueJS's documentation (now hosted at Codeberg, but used to be on a gist of mine).

If either of those are the reason I got suspended.... then.... WTF?
You'd tell me that you have a developer platform, and then you get surprised if developers know how to work around things that they don't like? That's what we do for fun :P

Guess who gets to do this on an industrial scale and stay on Github.

AdGoBye #

This is funnily enough still alive because Orgs outlive their owners.

Back in 2024, I made AdGoBye, which is a tool that brought an Adblocker to a certain social VR game.

If I got banned for this.... then there was nothing I could have done.
I've designed that tool with the most humility I can, keeping in mind the circumstances of people who get their content blocked because of the large money sums offered by certain advertisers to world creators. I've specifically put as guideline that we would not affect people's avatars (the content that they embody instead of the environment).

A ban for this would have been strange given how it's been years since this tool was active.

I made a joke repo that reversed text order #

I don't have a copy of the repo anymore, because this was an afternoon joke that I did in my Downloads folder....

I use a tool called VRCX, which is difficult to explain to someone who's not using it, but essentially is an API client.
I used to be within the community for this tool, and it has a Github feed, so we pretty regularly would see all the weirdly named personal forks that people would do of the repository.

So I got the idea for a joke, what if I made a version of the tool where it was all mirrored? Mirrored name, mirrored Readme, mirrored localization.
So I did! I inserted https://unicode-explorer.com/c/202E into every README line, into every localization line, I reversed the name to XCRV.

And that worked mostly! (the title bar is because of the desktop file I think)

It was funny, everyone had a laugh, I forgot about the repo after like a week.

If this what got me banned (perhaps due to a misled) spam filter.... then that's sad.
For one, try doing something malicious (like phishing a user for malware) when the repo looks like this (this is a low effort inspector edit to show you what it'd have looked like, I still don't have the repo):

On the other side, I know that campaigns don't make that much of an effort, especially editing the localization files.
And there's some obvious high profile accounts doing transparent spam, making the commit history unreadable, and not even getting a slap on the wrist for it (seriously, you know the pain of websocket-sharp if you're a C# dev).

About you #

This is the part that might ruin my chances to ever get my account back, I'm sure if I removed this section, I could post this onto Hacker news and my support ticket would magically get expedited.

This might also make some readers roll their eyes, but I have to write this.

If the idea of getting banned, having all your contributions to open source go away, and never getting any response about what happened scares you, that is perfectly rational.

Read my lips:

If this can happen to me, it will happen to you

You can disappear with no trace at the click of a button

Get off Github

Trust me, I know that Github Actions is insanely cheap. I know it's not simply snapping your fingers and making it happen. But when Github can erase everything you ever made, and your contributions to other people's projects which might include rationale on why code is developed, it's not someone you want as steward of your community.

There are tools like https://github.com/cooperspencer/gickup to make this process easier.

If your account is not suspended, Forgejo also allows you to migrate non-code items with an access token as well from the migration page: