I'm pretty sure that if this practice was widely known, there would be some tangible ire directed toward github, at least in the hacker/dev community.
> Although according to the customer service response, they would have done the exact same thing even if it had copious early activity.
Are you comfortable pasting that response in here? Thanks!
> Thanks for reaching out and my apologies for any worry this change has caused you. First, let me assure you that there has been no unauthorized access to your account: your username was changed by GitHub staff.
> We were contacted last March by someone with interest in claiming@@mind@@ for their own use. Upon inspection, we found that your account had not been accessed in over two years and we believed it to be abandoned. We released the username so another user could register it, per our name squatting policy: https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-policy
(AsteriskAsterisk was changed to @@ due to HN formatting)
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As I said above, my account definitely had been accessed within the past two years. And it had been created and immediately used. And given that I do email on my own domain, it was pretty easy to see that this wasn't part of some farm of accounts. (I responded with all these points, to no avail).
And now here I am again justifying my own position in terms of their deliberately wide-open policy, to make sure I stay on the right side of public consensus - really, if I was "name squatting", then so is anyone who takes a break from using a service.
My guess is that someone greased the rules behind the scenes for a friend's startup. Which is of course is illegible to "support", so they just end up running interference.
(This had completely slipped my mind - it's been a hell of a year).
My username was forcibly changed to "mind-zz". I found this out a mere 2 months after it happened, upon logging in.
Admittedly, my account did have little activity. I used it to make a bona fide Rust bug report, logged in at various other times to check said bug report or just look around, and then life happened.
So there weren't public URLs that were being relied on. Although according to the customer service response, they would have done the exact same thing even if it had copious early activity.
Presumably there's more of an invisible line based on how much your usage looks like you're dependent on them, and how much of a public disruption it would cause. But that's the point - the actual Rust repo isn't about to get yanked out from under all of us, and people that fit the mold of creating their new repos on Github are probably fine. But the less you're in the "community" the more you're at the mercy of their arbitrariness.