My GitHub account has been suspended since September 24th. No email, no reason. I expected support to tell me what happened and reinstate the account quickly. They didn't.
The first ticket was closed with template text before I could even reply. So I opened a second one and asked which repository and which workflow had supposedly triggered this, and why.
After 10 days of silence GitHub support decided to reply. With a template:
Some of the activity on your account has caught the attention of our abuse-detecting systems. Repeated violations of our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policies have been identified.
Which activity? Which violations? They didn't say. So I asked whether I was ever going to get an actual answer or whether they preferred to speak in templates. The reply came within the hour:
After further investigation of this particular account, we've determined that the account will need to remain restricted.
They can't share the reason, because revealing it "could compromise their ability to protect the platform and its users from actual spammers". And they hope I "can appreciate the need for this level of security".
No, I can't appreciate a level of security that bans a FOSS contributor without notice or reason. I'm not asking for their detection methods. I want to know what I was suspended for.
Another lesson in open source: if you don't run it, you don't control it. So I set up my own Forgejo server, and all my repos live there now:
https://git.maxnflaxl.dev/maxnflaxl
The GitHub links in older posts are dead for now. I will update this post should anything change.