Developers making mods and plugins for hentai games and sex toys say Github recently unleashed a wave of suspensions and bans against their repositories, and the platform hasn’t explained why.

Developers I spoke to said the community estimated around 80 to 90 repositories containing the work of 40 to 50 people went down recently, with many becoming inaccessible around late November and early December. Many of the affected accounts are part of the modding community for games made by the now-defunct Japanese video game studio Illusion, which made popular games with varying degrees of erotic content. One of the accounts Github banned contained the work of more than 30 contributors in more than 40 repositories, according to members of the modding community that I spoke to.

Github didn’t tell most suspended users what terms they broke to earn a suspension or ban, and developers told me they have no idea why their accounts went down without notice. They said they thought they were within Github’s acceptable use guidelines; even though they make mods for hentai games and things like interactive vibrator plugins, they took care to not host anything explicit directly in their repositories.

Archive: http://archive.today/eNOI1

  • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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    17 hours ago

    Except the difficulty in migrating from GitHub is not moving the source code, that’s the trivial part.

    It’s moving the discussions, issues, releases, free CI on GitHub Actions, free hosting on GitHub Pages, stars, visibility, existing community around the project on GitHub, losing contributors. These are the problems, not configuring git for another remote.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      True, but the article is about projects getting de-platformed, so all that goes away under those circumstances. There’s value tied up in all that data, but the codebase itself might be far harder to replace securely if the public repo just vanishes. Better to have at least an alternate offsite backup - on another service even - if all you do is maintain a project-owner-controlled clone.

      Plus, I know it’s a small gesture, but some folks might need that tiny push to migrate if they’re already fence-sitting about leaving.