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I have migrated all my codes that were on GitHub to GitLab and Bitbucket (job and personal, respectively). However, I am planning to leave my GitHub account opened, in case I need to use it for work reasons. Does anyone know if they close your account if it is empty and you do not commit/pull for a while?

mariofp77
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It's something that you'd find in the Terms of Service. I don't see anything on there except for their clause about grounds for termination:

GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.

They cite elsewhere in their ToS that they may terminate for a user being under the age of 13, or use of GitHub that infringes upon copyright. They do not terminate inactive accounts.

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Concrete example of an account deletion instance

https://github.com/volth was extremely likely deleted by GitHub:

They were an active NixOS contributor, and his deletion spawned a few threads of people asking what happened, notably because the deletion meant that every issue they had ever opened was also deleted, therefore losing information: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/how-was-this-treewide-pr-performed/11174/3

Github has deleted @volth account alongside all PRs, issue comments, and so forth ever made with that account.

For this reason, I find it very unlikely that volth deleted their own account, because it seems that several deleted issues they had created on repositories they are likely not owners of were completely deleted, which only owners can currently do: How to completely remove an issue from GitHub?

For example the 2020-10-20 archive links to https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/4134 which is currently a 404.

What happens when an user deletes their own account, is that their issues get transferred to the ghost user instead of disappearing completely, here's an example.

To make things even more interesting, at https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/145817/on-which-country-are-the-creators-and-servers-of-archive-today-archive-is-base/149405#149405 we can see that that account is used for Archive.today screen captures. Since those captures can still be made, it means that volth can still access the account, it's just that all his content has been made invisible to others, so "shadowban" would be a more adequate name for what happened rather than deletion. Unlike a deletion, it could in principle be reversed.

In another interesting event, this account seems to also have been shadow banned: https://github.com/cirosantillifather | https://archive.ph/zyhX4 However, GitHub didn't implement the follower count properly to account for that, because at https://github.com/cirosantilli?tab=following | https://archive.ph/wip/n5gXt we see that cirosantilli had a total of 1 follower, which was cirosantillifather, but the following list is empty.

Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com
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They can't, you're the only one that can do so.

Tim Lepage
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