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by aaronem 4437 days ago
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the sequence of events was there.

As best I've been able to work out, whatever juvenile oaf created the "dongml" repo added Shaw to it in order to harass him somehow, and Shaw responded by writing a script to constantly commit changes to the repo which essentially rendered it empty, which seems reasonable both as retaliation in that specific case, and for general reasons of good taste. Then, in response, Github added a feature so that the "dongml" infant could block Shaw.

Would anyone with closer to firsthand knowledge of the incident care to let me know whether I'm on the warm side or the cold?
1 comments
hamburglar 4437 days ago
You're close. Someone added Zed to the dongml repo just to be annoying, and Zed removed himself. But the inviter just added him again, and Zed complained that there isn't any sort of confirmation to indicate, "yes, I'd like to be part of this project," so people can add you against your will, which happened repeatedly to Zed with dongml. Eventually, Zed retaliated with his commit bot, and github apparently looked at that situation and decided that it would be best if they added a feature that let you block other users. However, the idea wasn't that dongml would block Zed's malicious commits, it was that Zed would be able to block the person that kept adding him to dongml. In other words, the github feature wasn't to prevent Zed's malicious checkins directly, but rather block the behavior that annoyed him into making them in the first place.

Zed wrote up a long blog post telling the whole story but I think it's been deleted since.

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masklinn 4436 days ago
> Zed wrote up a long blog post telling the whole story but I think it's been deleted since.

The internet has a way of unshutting the whole thing up: https://web.archive.org/web/20130117043748/http://sheddingbi...

and the followup https://web.archive.org/web/20120619005253/http://sheddingbi...

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nailer 4436 days ago
Ah. Judging from the followup, and Zed seemed to be satisfied, I think I was wrong about GutHub: they handled this very well.
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