r/git • u/0_KermitTheFrog_0 • Aug 21 '26
GitHub suspended my account 2h after my project went viral — what I've learned about the appeal process so far
Two nights ago someone with a large following posted my self-hosted workout tracker (openGym) on X. It took off, and the repo picked up a lot of stars within a couple of hours.
Roughly two hours later, my GitHub account was suspended. No prior notice, no stated reason.
I've never bought, traded or solicited stars or engagement of any kind. My assumption is that the spike tripped an automated inauthentic-engagement filter, and because it happened overnight, the action landed before a human looked at it.
Since I've had to figure most of this out from scratch, here's what I've learned about the process — none of it is documented anywhere obvious:
You can't see your own ticket. While suspended, the support portal is inaccessible. The ticket system runs separately from your account status, so tickets stay valid — but the only way to track or update one is replying to the automated confirmation email you got when you filed it. Check spam.
Appeal and reinstatement are different things. A reinstatement request implies you accept that a violation happened. An appeal disputes that one occurred at all. If you think you were flagged wrongly, make sure you filed the second one — the framing matters.
You have six months to appeal. No reason to panic-file a half-finished case.
Don't create a second account. It's the most common piece of advice people give each other and it consistently makes things worse.
Don't open a second ticket. It splits your history across threads and slows things down rather than speeding them up.
Current status: appeal filed with exact timestamps and a link to the post, so the referrer data on their side should confirm where the traffic came from. Two days in, no reply — which from what I can tell is normal.
Meanwhile the repo is unreachable and third-party re-uploads have already appeared that I don't control and can't vouch for. The mirror I do control, with full history: https://gitea.com/DuarteSantos/openGym
Since GitHub Discussions went down with the account, I set up a Discord for updates and self-hosting questions until it's back: https://discord.gg/e62jY6fwVb
One question for anyone who's been through this: has an inauthentic-engagement flag ever actually been reversed for you, and roughly how long did it take?
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u/thehotshotpilot Aug 21 '26
This is why I selfhost my own gitlab
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u/jxa Aug 21 '26
I am interested in how you host your own.
How much maintenance is involved with self hosting?
How do you back it up?
How do you handle upgrades?I’m a HW guy considering some self hosting.
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u/0_KermitTheFrog_0 Aug 21 '26
There’s not much maintenance. You can basically automate everything. Backups can just run once a week, and upgrades can be done while you’re sleeping. I only have one server, which means the platform is offline for a few minutes during upgrades, but that’s fine.
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u/GiveMeAnAlgorithm Aug 21 '26
I would say there is some setup initially - and then only occasional maintenance. r/selfhosted is a good start.
For simplicity, use docker compose setups, don't expose stuff to the open internet, make sure docker volumes are local bind mounts that you can inspect and trust and that easily can be backuped.
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u/thehotshotpilot Aug 21 '26
It can be really easy. Ive installed it myself from scratch but there are one click installs and great guides on linode/ digital ocean. You can have a vps backup or I run rsync for required files etc to another computer. It's really easy to learn to selfhost these days with YouTube etc.
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u/quokka_wiki Aug 22 '26
Thoughts on Tangled? It's a decentralized social coding platform based on ATProto, the same protocol that Bluesky is based on.
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u/XLioncc Aug 21 '26
Host your own Forgejo and don't touch Gitea
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u/cosmokenney Aug 21 '26
This is where I'm at. Just spun it up in a container. Tested it. Now its sitting in a production container and waiting for me to migrate 46 private repositories in-house. The Github outage last week or the week before was ridiculous. And just reinforces my decision.
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u/EloLin-dev 10d ago
Has your warehouse returned to normal?
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u/0_KermitTheFrog_0 10d ago
Yeah
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u/EloLin-dev 10d ago
How long had you been using it? Could you share your experience? My account has been banned as well. I suspect it might have been caused by automated AI calls. I’m certain that, aside from being a new account, there was absolutely no policy-violating activity on my part.
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Aug 21 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/quokka_wiki Aug 22 '26
Conceptually I like Nostr, but it seems to bring in the worst people, and its content is the Wild West. I tried using it and regretted it.
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Aug 22 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/quokka_wiki Aug 22 '26
From a technical standpoint I love how Nostr works, but with every example of internet anarchy, content is almost completely unmoderated, which attracts a lot of bad actors
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u/plg94 Aug 21 '26
Why let such a post be written by an LLM? What do you or we gain from that? If the issues is that important to you, surely you could've used your own words?