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How my friend got banned from GitHub

Dec 14, 2025 By Max Parry

This blog post is not written by the zackhe.uk webmaster. As a matter of fact, it’s impossible for him to write it…

My good friend got banned from GitHub for trying to help solve/dismiss an issue.

Rant

What is wrong with GitHub?

Due to these circumstances, I am proud to announce that I am planning to self-host this website and all of it’s related content on my Raspberry Pi 4 or 5.

From bad UX decisions, to this… I believe GitHub has truly lost the plot.

The ban

GitHub said my friend’s account “violates our Acceptable Use Policy”, by partaking in “behaviors that significantly or continually disrupts the experience of other users” whatever the hell that means…

According to them themselves, it means “behaviors that significantly or continually disrupts the experience of other users” could mean:

• posting off-topic comments
• opening empty or meaningless issues or pull requests
• starring and or following accounts or repositories in large volume in a short period of time
• creating nonsensical or irrelevant code reviews
• engaging with platform features in a way that causes excessive notifications for other users
• using any other platform feature in a way the creates disruption

Now, what in the hell he could of said is something that is lost to time…

Don’t use GitHub

The fact that Microsoft can do this in the first place is god damn Orwellian.

What gives them the right to do this? And without specifying what he even did? Are you kidding me GitHub?

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Some other good alternatives to GitHub:

• host git yourself (best option)
• Gitlab
• Codeberg(?)

That said, I don’t expect you’ll struggle to find other good alternatives - almost anything is better then this.

I’m not going to bother finishing writing this article because GitHub doesn’t deserve any more of my limited time and effort.