[DetectDefect]

Missing from this heartfelt plea is any indication of what code you were working on before the ban, or why you are so certain it was a result of credit card activities. We only get your side of the story - what does Github support actually tell you?

Regardless, hopefully a valuable lesson in mirroring public contributions to other source control systems (Gitlab, Codeberg, etc.) is learned.

[nicomeemes]

As far as code goes, I never contributed to anything even remotely malicious. I worked primarily on obscure scraping problems related to Puppeteer and Playwright. I built some libraries for that I published on NPM, but at no point did I ever contribute or use GitHub in any capacity for anything malicious. I am a hundred percent certain of this, and this is why I am inclined to the other explanation which seems to make more sense. I would love to get their side of the story. The problem is the rules prohibit creating a new account to discuss the old account being banned without warning. So this sort of kneecaps any potential conversation. Nonetheless, I have broken the rules, I guess, and created a new account and tried to establish some contact, but my ticket doesn't get any responses and based on my research it doesn't seem like it will.

Point taken about mirroring to Codeberg (or sr.ht), and this is something I was already planning on doing in terms of migration. At the same time, if there was any way to restore my GitHub, that would certainly simplify all of my next steps.

More than my own repos, I'm mainly concerned about my contributions to others. I've gotten hired twice just by someone contacting me from an issue that I had fixed on a GitHub discussion and that's no longer there.

[nicomeemes]

My ideal resolution would be just to get an idea of what happened, what caused the ban, so I can avoid that in the future, and me taking my time to go through GitHub's terms of service so that I do understand what I'm agreeing to. I'll own it- when I was 14 I did not carefully read the terms of service agreement, which was updated who knows how many times since then. This was a long time ago.

I would even be willing to freeze my GitHub in its current state, restoring it but not allowing any further activity on it. I just want the record of to be able to say, "Hey, I fixed this issue in node-tar" or "I fixed this issue in Puppeteer Extra". Note: Edited OP to include my SO.

[the__alchemist]

This reads like victim-blaming.

[nicomeemes]

I had that initial reaction too, but he's right. I mean, I fucked up. I didn't read the Terms of Service evidently, and I'm suffering for that. What I do know for sure though is that I never, under any circumstances, contributed to anything malicous. That is: malware, cryptominers, and their ilk.

As a developer who's still early in their career, my hope is that someone will see this, understand the existential weight of having all that work disappear, and be sympathetic to a request for a second chance.

[brudgers]

If I’ve understood your comments, I get the impression your business practices entail scraping. Often but not always, scraping for money happens in an adversarial context.

If that’s the case, your adversaries are incentivized to employ counter-measures and/or simply make your life difficult in general. It could be as straight-forward as a letter to the platform from in-house legal with reference to DCMA or similar. Or to put it another way, if you are scraping sites people will pay you to scrape, even if you aren’t on questionable legal ground there’s a non-trivial chance the scraping is making the targets unhappy.

[DetectDefect]

It is important to establish facts and a narrative before asserting who the victim actually is.

[the__alchemist]

Hah I get it. A lot of times there turns out to be something big left out, but this passes the smell check for me.