It absolutely happens at GitHub, but we typically will reach out to a dormant user to ask if they can get the name if a need comes up (and sometimes send goodies in thanks).

Overall it's pretty painless, and the dormant users are thankful for the notification.

Brian addressed the account activity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599802

Shouldn't have been considered inactive.

Exactly. My Github account looks dormant because I don't have many public repos, but I check in code nearly every day in a bunch of private repos. Don't assume that an account is inactive just because it has no public posts. A company should determine active/inactive status based on logins.

The idea of renaming an account on Github concerns me because an account's repos may be referenced by others' git submodules. I'd hate to find one of my repos inadvertently referencing a repo I did not intend to reference.

Yeah, that's totally understandable. Fortunately almost all of these cases are for accounts with no repositories.

In cases where an account does have repositories (user initiated renames) the old URLs/repos will redirect as long as another user doesn't take the old name and create repos with the same name[1].

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/what-happens-when-i-change-...

Good point, also Ruby Gemfiles can reference github repos.

For both Gemfiles and submodules this is an extra reason to fork the original and reference your fork rather than directly link to the original (unless it is big and reliable and unlikely to to be replaced e.g. rails).

Where does it say this account was inactive? IF it says such a thing anywhere how long was it inactive?

The article itself claims it was inactive.

Incorrect. The original article says nothing of the sort.

The update which came after your post says this however: "Our only guess is that she did not post as often as they might not have liked."

But he does say elsewhere that she used it often to rate images. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599802

Can you tell us where? I don't see it.

Thanks for this!

Just nabbed https://github.com/stephen was inactive since 2008.