My account got suspended without notification. Want some thoughts about what might have been the cause. #150306
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TheDonsky-Toptal
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Hello, my original account (TheDonsky) was suspended two days ago (Jan 28) without any prior warnings or notifications. I simply noticed that I no longer had access to my account when I tried to push something and got an "Terms of service violation" error message. I got the same message when I tried to log-in and my public repos are no longer visible.
I created a support ticket (3206075) and am waiting for the response. I am aware that the community is not able to resolve or escalate my issue. I am creating this post, because support takes it's time, I don't have an email with reasons and I want to hear the opinions about the possible cause.
Since I have no details, I will simply lay-out information about my repositories and recent activity (that I remember of) and maybe someone can catch something dubious:
1. Jimara - An open source Game-Engine I've been building on my own time. It consists of 3 repositories:
2. Dumb-Ray - CUDA based renderer I wrote about 6 years ago; a dead project, just a part of the portfolio by this point and does not contain any third-parties.
3. Some university projects I archived. It's a private repository and I don't remember it's content right out of the gate. Not sure if I have a local copy I can find easily.
4. Multiple Private repositories I used for archiving photos I took on various trips:
I know, this is not an intended use-case for Git, but game projects are generally allowed to contain as many image blobs as we like and I don't think these violated any terms.
I have local copies, so deleting these repos is not a tragedy, they were more of a "backup plan" in case my NAS ever failed. I will be content with working on a new solution if it comes to that.
One thing I think might have triggered the system is that I used a "commit script" of sorts to upload the pictures chunk-by-chunk and the load may have been large enough to cause suspicion.
I have received warnings about size-quotas from time to time, but NEVER about any 'suspicious activity' or violations.
One 'paranoid' though, but more of a joke really, is that I had a few bird pictures and I used to name the folders and some files according to their common names. One of them is 'parus major' in Latin and the common name may have been misinterpreted by a bot. I don't think censorship applies to private repos, but I would be amazed if this caused all the ruckus.
5. Contractors' projects:
For the freelance clients I have, I do not host any repos of my own, but they have given me access to theirs. Currently, I have two such cases on my account.
One of them has been there for more than a year;
Another got added a day before my account got suspended. I have not had time to take a look at their code, but I pulled it and ran it on a virtual machine that did not have access to my account. I did use a shared folder, but the repo clone and a few folders they've sent was pretty much all that was visible to the VM. Also VM had access to internet.
In addition to this, I think I need to mention, that I accidentally clicked on Copilot button in VS code and closed the dialogue immediately. Don't know how this relates to anything, but have read some posts about a bug with that....
Please let me know what, if anything here seems suspicious and may have warranted the suspension due to TOS violation. If there's something legitimate here, I would be more than happy to solve everything and anything.
Aside from that, I created this account temporarily to try to find a solution; I initially created a ticket on the same day and the following morning I was informed that I needed to create the ticket from the account I could no longer log-into and gave some instructions. Followed them and got the ticket number mentioned above. I'm waiting now and if that takes too long, at least I'll have your suggestions to try not to screw up another account.
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