Zed Shaw: Github's Favorite Joke

I'm the GitHub employee that fixed the bug. I usually try not to get involved with stuff like this but I feel like I'm in a unique situation to correct the record here.<p><i>"They purposefully allow this glaringly obvious mechanism for insulting and annoying their members and are actually involved in the joke."</i><p>I've never heard of the joke. I've never heard of anyone at GitHub being involved in one of these jokes.<p>There has been one case that I'm aware of where someone mass added people to a repository in order to fill up activity feeds. That person was banned. It's an issue we'd like to address more generally.<p><i>"Until I broke their server they were all laughing at my 'testing' then they were pissed when they had to fix the bug I found."</i><p>I fixed the bug without being aware of any of this. I check our exception monitor every day. It was there. It was obvious. I fixed it.<p>It was a simple bug triggered by branch names that look like commit SHA1s. Here's the commit:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/88bc774d0c97e6c955c0" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/88bc774d0c97e6c955c0</a><p>It affected only branch list pages with branch names matching [0-9a-f]{40}.<p><i>"If you don't believe me, look at the HackerNewsTips twitter account, which I know is astroturfed by a github employee."</i><p>That is <i>not</i> a GitHub employee. We don't hire anyone that witty as a rule.

Zed really has a victim complex. As Ryan validated above, I can guarantee you anyone who has any authority at all at github did <i>not</i> encourage or sanction this behavior. It may not have been high on the fix queue, but thats because they expected people to be rational, and they can just manually ban the people who abuse the system.<p>Zed.. seriously... the world is not out to get you. We love your code and your contributions. Don't let a few losers get you down.

Love Zed, Hate Zed or neither, it is disappointing if Github really allows this type of abuse to happen with no repercussions.<p>...and I have been a major Github fanboi from day 1, so it sucks for me to see such pettiness.<p>Quite frankly, I am not a big fan of Zed Shaw either...his hissy fits tend to get on my nerves....but come on man Github.<p>You are a damn company!

I'm a bit surprised that Github would allow one of their employees to behave that way without firing them. Love Zed or hate Zed, he's still a user, and you're still a company providing a service; show some professionalism.<p>Zed: I'm on your side here, but <i>please</i> stop rising to these assholes' attacks. You're not going to convince them to change their ways, and getting into a pissing match with them gives them what they're looking for. You won this one, but your time is worth more than this.

Interesting how this disappeared from HN's front page without being dead-ed.<p>I seem to recall the 'Programming, Motherfucker' link meeting a similar mysteriously early demise, despite its 800+ upvotes.

Is GitHub really aiding and abetting this kind of anti-social behaviour/feature? This kind of allegation demands an official response, and soon. Otherwise it's mega bad PR.<p>More than anything, I'm surprised that you can add a collaborator to a project unilaterally. A way to request an add seems like a natural choice considering you can request pulls.

I think the larger community has to shun this kind of behavior from Github. It's unacceptable and unprofessional.<p>Although I don't like how Zed is repeatedly qualifying the homophobic Martini as a Ruby guy, as if Ruby made him this way, Martini is a douche from his behavior. This has nothing to do with languages.<p>I'm with Zed on this.

It should be noted that GitHub does allow users to remove themselves from collab'd repos (the article stated otherwise.)<p>Being a collab on a repo has no affect (public or private), other than the fact that it will show up in your personal repo list when you're logged in.<p>GitHub has also banned users in the past for abusing the service. I'm sure they would have acted accordingly if a complaint was filed.

Yet another reason why some of us fear getting too close to the Ruby hipsters.

What a bunch of children.<p>It's not cool to antagonize people<p>It's not cool to DDOS a service.<p>It's not cool to call someone out in a public forum.<p>Grow up people.

Professionall trolling. GitHub made the world a better place - assuming open-source makes the world better that is which I do - and they've done this pixel-perfectly IMO downtimes aside. What this is about is pure hate from Zed, probably jelousy that some people from his past succeeded silently building one of the greatest web companies that exists with hardly no funding while Zed himself was writing rants. Mongrel might very well require a intelligent mind, but every intelligent person knows that the only way of owning trolls are by the dog treatment: ingore the trolls, and go on building great stuff. I know average people knowing this as common sense.

All the dick jokes are hilarious when you're hanging out with your buddies, but GitHub is a professional forum. Would you do the same thing on LinkedIn? How does that kind of misogyny reflect on your colleagues and employer?

Livejournal had this problem a few years ago. You could add anyone to a community, and everyone's profile page had a list of all the communities they were in...<p>Zed should absolutely get off Github; he's enough of a troll magnet that people will figure out ways to mess with him even after this is fixed. It's easy enough to set up a bare repository on a random machine you have SSH access to.

The most entertaining thing about all this is that you can merge against nonexistent branches in git.<p>I think my eyes just crossed.

Would be good to see github do something about it. Was looking to use github for some new projects but after reading this now I might have a look at alternatives

This story is no longer on the front page for some reason.

This whole thing is a waste of bytes.<p>Simply adding someone to a repo makes it show up in their <i>private</i> repositories list and nowhere else. Annoying? Probably. A big deal? Hardly. (To have it show up <i>anywhere</i> else you have to commit to it.)<p>The HackerNewsTips twitter account is not confirmed to be a GitHub employee and rtomayko, who is <i>at least</i> somewhat trustworthy, flat out says it isn't.<p>The only interesting thing here is the bug related to the `[0-9a-f]{40}` regex -- and that's been fixed.<p>It's over, and it would be great if we could move on quickly from this one.

Time for Github to start banning people

While it would've been better to just ignore him, I must say, fighting back with working code lends Zed some amount of class.

Zed, you gave me a hearty laugh.<p>But please take a minute to think about starting a mud-slinging contest with a pig. Think about how you repeatedly stated that you didn't understand the motivation to show you the peni, where you direct your limited attention and time, etc.<p>If you are considering all that already, well rock on :)

Reminds me of this troll 'Insulting source code': <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454" rel="nofollow">http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454</a>

So does anyone know who runs the HAckerNewsTips twitter?

That was an obnoxious read.

&#62; Getting off github and onto bitbucket would another 20-30 minutes.<p>Actually, much less than that - 5 minutes at most, for creating the repo.<p><a href="http://hg-git.github.com/" rel="nofollow">http://hg-git.github.com/</a>

Wow, so much drama.

Zed: Here's how you fix it - Get the 4chan on it. They'll create projects with all sorts of unsavoury content then add all sorts of people. They'll fuck up GitHub once and for all and force it to shut down.<p>Live by the trolls, die by the trolls