It has been a full week now since GitHub disabled our public repository for Quilibrium. Here's what we know.

1. After pushing through multiple connections to escalate the case, we finally received a support response after the first 48 hours:

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

Suffering from success, but the "following reports" line gives us pause this may have been a malicious report. There have been many times that the ticket had an updated time, but with no visible info. We replied to their message, and at this point, contacted their sales team to see if Premium support could expedite.

Three days later, we finally get another response, refusing to budge on this, and not being willing to reinstate the repo. The next day, I got a message from the sales rep to schedule a call.

Taking the call with the sales rep was very revelatory. This representative, who I will not name because I don't believe they deserve to be fired for telling the truth, said that there was a chance premium support would potentially get this unstuck, but it would cost "several tens of thousands of dollars a year".

They additionally revealed two other bizarre things going on with the state of GitHub:
1. Copilot is absolutely destroying their resources for non-enterprise customers, and they've been stretched too far to properly provide regular git services for non-enterprise users, causing several outages.

2. Management of support has told them in order to alleviate budget and time allocation, to stonewall anyone asking to have a repo restored after automated triggers disabled it. Further, reinstantiating the repo on a different name will subsequently also issue a full account ban.

Armed with this knowledge, we pushed harder against support yesterday, offering them two choices: 
1. acknowledge this was a simple mistake and with no communication provided, they put themselves and us into a serious bind and specifically caused us significant harm, and restore the repo so we can resolve this.

2. Alternatively, if they will not, we gave them formal notice to preserve all records associated with this repository takedown, because if this was sourced from external reports, we have the right to know who caused us deliberate harm and will pursue this.

At this time, we have still received no response. Magically, github issues had an incident this morning. But that call with the sales rep revealed issues are serviced via Zendesk on the backend, so I went over to Zendesk to see if there were any active incidents. There were none.

We hope GitHub will be cooperative, but if not, we'll be very curious to see if the timestamps I captured on their ticket updates line up with internal notes they were asked to retain. Because if they don't, we'll have firm proof of destruction of evidence.

We had an auto upgrade script that checked the repo and pulled the latest for updates. We weren't aware this was a violation, as there were many other repos existing for years without issue. That being said, we also have had over 200,000 nodes, so we might just be more popular than those.

𝔽𝕚𝕣𝕖 𝕕𝕒𝕟𝕔𝕖𝕣 & 𝔸𝕣𝕥𝕚𝕤𝕥 🔥

It is fortuitous I'm building the lego blocks for launching decentralized versions of existing web2 services. 🙂

This is wild. We need decentralized GitHub

Building https://srcbook.com // creator of the https://blockchainsmokers.xyz

We followed the same logic a Chia-adjacent repository has been doing for years, assumed it was fine given their longevity, I guess it only revealed we were way more popular.

Literally never seen this, but maybe GitHub was being used like a package registry?

It's me Rob! Most call me Emp.
Life long creative| On chain since 21'| life is for learning|
artist, musician, craftsmen|
https://linktr.ee/Empathetic_Alchemy

Their terms are unfortunately vague, so ultimately it's a violation if they say it is, but incredibly likely that our popularity could have triggered whatever internal trigger they had. That being said, this immediately followed after a hosting provider did a banwave (they forbid crypto, so it's their right) /2

So what's your take? 

 Do you think it was a violation, or was it just an increasing of genuine activity pushing you over the bandwidth limit?

Hope they resolve this quickly & amicably. if not, I know an excellent crypto-aligned litigator who would be happy to take a consultation. GL & feel free to DC

Thinking of pursuing legal action if you can get enough evidence? Personally I would if I were you, although not sure how much legal fees would run.

Move to Gitlab or Radicle?

Back in 2008, hosting pictures this was a problem called hotlinking and I guess GH is far from a good CDN.

Give try to CI/CD for serving content which would costs you extra $50 and save headache.

Their reinstate conds make sense to milk, as their threshold is crossed.

Oh man... the part that gets me is that this was all without warning... not cool.

well at least you didn't meet cloudflare's trust & safety team

Still using centralized protocols? This is what we get