Just when I thought I was untouchable; A website no more

Man, I was really happy these 2 weeks. 2 days ago I just passed all my finals and end of course tests with a shining grade, and I was doing a lot of things. I was productive. I was getting tremendous work done.
But of course not everything is right, not for one day. Because I'm Vincent, and technology never wants to work for me.
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Website

So GitHub, my website host emails me. My website is my pride and joy, it's the thing I've been working on all year. I get this email from GitHub that says
first message said:
Access to the VinLark/vinlark.github.io repository has been disabled by GitHub staff due to a terms of service violation.
You’ll need to reply to this email to restore access to this repository.
Click to expand...
That's it. No reason why, not letting me appeal, nothing.
So, wondering why, I email them asking why my site got taken down.
GitHub support being slower than dial up internet replies THREE days later with this very short message.
second message said:
The repository in question was disabled following reports that it contains content in violation of GitHub's Terms of Service. Specifically, the Pages site was found to be hosting a blog that contained sexually obscene content, in violation of section C.2 of our terms.

As such, the repository will need to remain disabled.
Click to expand...
Then it hits me.

So i was hosting an archive of this guy's blog. A blog that, I won't get into, but there was a reason I was archiving it.
Now, as I think about it, it was very stupid for me to be hosting that kind of blog on GitHub's servers, and the guy was also hosting his site on git, which got taken down as well.

So here I am, having to restructure my site as a whole because some parts of my site was made only for GitHub (my blog section is out of the window now, as It used Jekyll and no hosting service in their right mind supports that).

But what really gets me about this, is that if I had not had a backup of my site, it would be all gone. Poof, like it never existed. This isn't a thing where it's hidden from the public, GitHub disabling your repository is them taking a hold of it and you never seeing it again. I had issues and checklists on that repository that I really needed, that I'm never going to be able to see again.

This whole thing has been making me think about what we actually own when we upload it to a service such as GitHub. If GitHub can just strip me of my website and not give anything back, then just imagine what they could do to way larger codebases.

Also, this freezing of my site also makes a huge security hole for me. Everything connected to my site is frozen, so my cydia repo and blog is frozen. Parts of my site not even connected to my main site. You can still see them, you can still download from them, you can still interact with them, but I cannot remove these sites, push an update, or even pull from these repositories. There is a security bug in my blog that I've been needing to fix in the gemlock file, that now I can't even touch. My cydia repo hosts a very broken tweak that causes cydia to crash if you don't have another specific repo.

If anybody were to trigger one of these security holes, I would be responsible and I couldn't do anything about it. I can't even update the FUCKING README FILE to sya "hey this is deprecated please don't use this use my new site."

How GitHub deals with this is very bad, and I do admit I had some wrong, but GitHub has more wrongs on how they treat sub-sections of my site and even how they took down my main site.

But hey, now I have a new site, and old sites to worry about.

https://vinlark.info
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Comments

Seriel
Pretty sure you can host Jekyll sites on GitLab, and a few random hosts, or your own VPS by installing and setting up Jekyll yourself.

Regardless that sucks, glad you got a new site up and running!
 
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H1B1Esquire
"Because I'm Vincent, and technology never wants to work for me."

Well, try working with technology; technology is made by people, and just like people, it isn't perfect, has issues, and can either enrich your life or totally fuck it up.
Roll it like a tire; treat it like a fire.

"That's it. No reason why, not letting me appeal, nothing."

Yeah, I had a similar issue with this. Definitely on a different level, but the feeling is the same. This is the reason I have "WHY?" tattooed on my hand. At least the response wasn't, "Because."

I feel you'll be okay. Even at the end, you can still look forward. I believe in you and your accomplishments so far.

Good job on the work you've put in. Sometimes the road is a dirt path covered in horse shit, but every road isn't like that. You'll find the path you need to lead you beyond Rome.
 
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V
@H1B1Esquire In this GitHub situation, I can't really work with anything lol. But the first line was just a nod to how many Technology fuck up stories I have. But thank you, very kind words.
 
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H1B1Esquire
Oh, I have been there before, but the good part is, for every struggle, you'll be able to help others, should you choose to. It might even give you the motivation to change the systems in place, or at the very least, give you a reason to write some very detailed, but respectful emails expressing your frustration.
 
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Ev1l0rd
Cant you yknow... delete the repos in some form or ask a support ticket to be made to remove them? I'm sure GitHub doesnt want to suffer the bad PR of leaving up shit with security holes in them. No matter how you put it, they still provide the content. At least that way you can resolve the security risks n shit.

Also, honestly, make backups n shit. Moving the Jekyll to GitLab isnt very hard (look at the GitLab CI, its only slightly different from Travis) and you can probably easily adapt the builder script I linked you when you initially talked about your blog.

Finally, if youre rehosting someone elses content, if I may be so kind to give you this little warning: Dont do it in a public area if its controversial/edgy shit. Big corporations do not like being attached to either and would rather just get rid of them completely. Either selfhost or get a VPS of sorts where the owners dont give a damn about who uses what.

That or dont host other peoples work and get the blame when their work puts you at the core of controversy.

Just my 2 small cents for you on the matter.
 
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Ev1l0rd
In addition, jekyll just puts out static HTML. You can install it locally and upload the contents of uh... _site iirc to your hosting provider. GitHub just allows for easy automatization.
 
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V
GitHub's only support line is their email, which I've already emailed about this matter and they haven't responded. It usually takes an average of 3 days for them to respond sadly. I really hope they will throw me a bone here and just delete all of it. I can't think of a reason to not delete it.

Yeah,I'm really good with backups. I have everything hosted on GitHub backed up. But I would hate to imagine a scenario in which somebody's repo got taken down and they didn't have a backup. And I'll look into GitLab after I get this sorted out, I wanna take it one step at a time.

I actually didn't mean to host the blog archive on GitHub, it just kinda came with me from my first site on my .rf.gd domain. I should have known better as to host it on GitHub's public servers though. The guy that owned the blog was actually aware of this. He advised me to use his own git to just clone his site, as opposed to use httrack which was nice. But once his site got reported and nuked, my site came with it.

Thanks!
 
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Quantumcat
This is an eye-opener, I was sort of treating my GitHub repos AS my backups. Scary they can just take it away at their whim and not give you the chance to back it up first (like a one-week warning or something).
 
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Pleng
But what really gets me about this, is that if I had not had a backup of my site, it would be all gone.
Click to expand...

This is a risk for any data stored anywhere that's not backed up, cloud or not. It's in no way limited to GitHub
 
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Ev1l0rd
@Quantumcat I have a gogs setup (basically a very easy to set up git server with a github-esque UI, notabug uses it) that mirrors all my public repos. Might be interesting to look into if you want to back it up.
 
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Seriel
You can also mirror them to the likes of GitLab or uh, any other Git host.
Also its worth noting that if you like to work on the project locally (As opposed to editing the files on the GitHub website), you'll always have those local copies to serve as backups, with the entire commit history intact and ready to upload to another git host. Even if you don't work on it locally you still might as well "git clone" it and run a "git pull" every now and then to keep a local backup with everything intact.
 

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