My GitHub Account got Banned!

On September 15th, 2022, my GitHub account got banned. The reason was that I violated GitHub rules.

Behind The Scenes

Our college had a technical event called “Technitude.” As I am the technical head of CSI(computer society of India)DMCE, I have to organize some technical events. We developed a website and deployed it on Heroku. In the event’s morning, I got word that the deployed site is down due to an internal server error. I had to log in to my GitHub account on my college PC to push the local changes to GitHub again. Unfortunately, even the GitHub site was down. That day, we had to postpone our event. In the evening, my GitHub account got banned without prior notice or any mail. And it was a disaster for me. My repos, projects, contributions, and deployed sites, everything was gone in a flash.

Solutions I tried

-There is reinstatement support at GitHub where you can appeal if your account gets hidden or disabled by GitHub.
GitHub support. I emailed GitHub and explained the issue in detail. GitHub’s response process is a bit slow as it has plenty of users. It’s saying that you don’t have to spam emails to GitHub as it results only in further delay. But my placements were coming and the account was necessary at that time, So I had sent more than one message. In fact, I was sending an email per day. Don’t repeat this mistake. because even if it's a slow process, it’s totally trustworthy. GitHub truly cares for its customers.

• I searched for GitHub’s official discord server but I didn’t find it, so I asked other open source communities, but most of them didn’t know that even GitHub accounts can be banned.
  p.s. (Even I had no idea how my GitHub account got banned).
  Someone suggested tweeting by tagging GitHub and communities. I tried that too.
  but nothing helps.
  [Tweet]!(https://twitter.com/yashnerkar81/status/1570611519729332226)

• I also contacted the officials of GitHub on Twitter with zero expectations of getting a reply. And, I got a message from Juan Pa, who is the student program manager at GitHub Education, that he had reached out to the team for a review. And I was relieved by seeing his message.

• As my interviews were coming, I had to create a new account and upload the projects and portfolio which I had backed up on the local.

GitHub released my account

After a week, GitHub finally responded to my first ever mail.
The mail :-

I was shocked because I didn’t make any such comment through my account on GitHub discussions. I believe someone commented from my account from the college PC. I don’t know if the person who did this was doing a prank or if he knew this would be a violation of GitHub policy. But the damage was done. God knows what happened. But I got my account back! The only suggestion I can give is that you have to keep your patience. You have to wait until GitHub does not respond back. The GitHub team will surely get back to you.
Thank you GitHub and the fellows who helped me through this difficult time!