[ajb]

It would be a "rumour" if I had stated that it was the truth. If it's not the right explanation then fine, but I see no need for defensiveness. I mentioned that possibility not to criticise elastic, but because it's a security property of GitHub that very much violates the principle of least surprise and that I suspect of causing a security problem for at least one of my previous employers. Well worth spreading awareness IMO.

[xeraa]

A: "I'm betting..." B: "Could be, or maybe..." — once you reach E it's probably a statement. That sounds almost like the definition of how to start a rumor...

Since we don't maintain private forks for the Elasticsearch repository (maybe for someone's short lived feature development), the problem of private or deleted forks shouldn't be an issue here.