[junon]

Another gripe; unrelated, but since we're piling on...

My username ends in a hyphen. Apparently, that's no longer allowed, though my username appears to be grandfathered in.

Trying to give feedback about new experimental features lands me on the GitHub communities site, which is treated as a standalone app and thus requires you to log in via GitHub (it doesn't re-use the existing session token).

However, Communities won't let me sign up with my username since it has a hanging hyphen, and I can't change the username in the form. So I effectively can't sign up.

Support has not responded for over a month. Feels like things are inching toward getting worse with GitHub.

[belter]

I am surprised a Microsoft MVP Certified Professional expert did not pop up yet in the newsgroup, asking you to reboot your machine and review the steps in a certain technote ;-)

[Causality1]

Hey now, that's libel. There are problems that can be solved by rebooting, and a Microsoft MVP would never post a genuine potential solution. I'm pretty sure you meant to say "an MVP popped up in the newsgroup to copy/paste a paragraph of random intro text and then ask if he's solved your problem".

[NGRhodes]

You are giving them too much credit, it will be copy and pasted from the post/thread/comment/accepted solution that you have already stated you have tried and does not work.

[framecowbird]

"Have you tried closing your browser and then opening it again?"

[13415]

They usually recommend to reinstall the whole operating system, though. Because people have time for this...

[favadi]

I still remember the night when logrus's author decided to rename his Github account and broke our production build (https://github.com/sirupsen/logrus/pull/384). Since then, I always vendor third party dependencies.

[junon]

To be fair, this is a side effect of poor module system design in Go. Not really github's fault here.

[GordonS]

I don't mean to "victim blame", but I'm curious why you'd choose a username ending in a hyphen in the first place? (I would have thought this wouldn't work on lots of services)

[junon]

I signed up to GitHub almost 11 years ago, and someone else already registered the username I used for everything. So 11-years-ago-me tacked on a hyphen as I had seen a few other people do it, too.

[KennyBlanken]

> I signed up to GitHub almost 11 years ago, and someone else already registered the username I used for everything. So 11-years-ago-me tacked on a hyphen

"I purposefully chose to create a nearly identical username to an existing user" isn't a great defense to someone saying the problem is between the chair and keyboard.

At best you didn't think of the possible confusion you'd cause.

[junon]

Both the other account and myself are quite active on GitHub. There has been a mistype maybe 5 times in 11 years.

So sorry, but no. Things have been fine. In places where the hyphen is ambiguous, I always make a point to mention it. It's never really been an issue, and the other individual has always been quite nice when the hyphen is omitted, kindly pinging me instead.

I'm not trying to defend against anything except poor attempts to paint me as somehow malicious...

[mmis1000]

> "I purposefully chose to create a nearly identical username to an existing user"

Is that even surprising? Some names are just so common that people use them all the time and ends up as John, John_ , John-, John1, John11. John100

[jeroenhd]

Hyphens and underscores are often permitted characters in usernames, more so than exclamation marks or other special characters.

I don't really see what problem using a hyphen in a username could pose, unless there's some kind of filter being applied that doesn't take into account the previously permitted characters. I'd guess someone applied an [A-z0-9]+ without thinking too much about it because that's what the current username rules are.

I'm more surprised that there's a second authorization endpoint, Github could've just used their existing OAuth2 implementation to log users in if they didn't want to reuse the existing login code.

[rement]

Fun ASCII gotcha: [A-z] includes [ ] \ ^ _ and `

[kitten_mittens_]

I think this is why I usually see `[A-Za-z]` for ascii. My previous employer decidedly ignored "non-english" text.

`[A-z]` -> https://regex101.com/r/IlhPiD/1 `[A-Za-z]` -> https://regex101.com/r/iWjwf2/1

After looking it up, `\p{L}` looks like it matches letters https://regex101.com/r/1UiG9S/1.

[RedShift1]

Have you tried sfc /scannow?

[jrochkind1]

Github does let you change your username.

I imagine if support got back to you, they'd say "Yes, that was grandfathered in for backwards compatibilty, but that username is no longer allowed and won't always work with new services or functions, as you discovered. We recommend changing your username."

However, not getting a response is not encouraging, it's true.

[grepfru_it]

I've got you bro, try again in a week

[junon]

For real? :o

[Eikon]

Sounds like a very important and critical issue that should be prioritised.

[floatingatoll]

“We” are not piling on; you are.

Please don’t shop unrelated concerns to threads that aren’t about that concern. GitHub breaking release URLs worldwide after a multi-hour global outage has no relationship whatsoever to your problem. I sympathize with your frustration, but pet peeve derails pollute HN discussions about every topic under the sun these days. Submit a post instead, and if it doesn’t get traction, so be it.

[junon]

> pet peeve derails pollute HN

This isn't a pet peeve derailment. This is commentary on the multitude of issues GitHub has had in recent history, at least from my perspective.

A "pet peeve" is something I find annoying. This isn't that - it's a bug.

Further, my comment doesn't break the guidelines. I'm not commenting on the layout. I'm not flagrantly dismissing someone's work. If you don't like my comment, either keep scrolling or downvote and move on?

[floatingatoll]

By your logic, any time someone posts about GitHub, it’s appropriate and sensible for each of us to post about whatever GitHub bug upsets us most. This leads to the HN we have today, with hundreds of upvoted comments per day clamoring about each individual’s personal upsets, wholly unrelated to the topics at hand.

If you had violated a guideline, I would have contacted the mods rather than reply. The tragedy is that no rule can sufficiently be written that keeps people from concern shopping their personal issues into discussions on the most tenuous of links. “This is a post about a GitHub bug” opens the door for me to post about the hundreds of GitHub bugs I’ve encountered over time, and with thousands of users at HN, if we each do this, there’s so much less room left for discussion about the actual bug this post is about.

This affects Show HN, too: when someone posts their cool thing, everyone chimes in with all the other cool things that they like better. It’s incredibly disheartening and sets aside the purpose of the post – “a thing, discuss” – so that people can use that request as a launchpad to discuss other things instead, without making even the slightest effort to tie it back with relative comparisons to the Show HN topic itself.

There is no guideline that asks us to set aside our personal needs and desires in these comments and focus on what brings the most value to the original topic, no matter what we feel about other topics that happen to also be about GitHub. But I continue to hope, out loud and with salient arguments, that HN will step up and respect itself more than the guidelines require.