Comment by tredre3
5 days ago
Github has changed their policy in 2022.
Before that it was possible to contact support to reclaim any username provided that they had no meaningful public repos and they were inactive for a long time. It was at the staff's discretion, there wasn't an elaborate policy of what constitutes inactive, but I've successfully reclaimed a username inactive for 2 years myself.
The old policy was:
GitHub account names are provided on a first-come, first-served basis, and are intended for immediate and active use. Account names may not be inactively held for future use. GitHub account name squatting is prohibited. Inactive accounts may be renamed or removed by GitHub staff at their discretion. Keep in mind that not all activity on GitHub is publicly visible. Staff will not remove or rename any active account.
Attempts to sell, buy, or solicit other forms of payment in exchange for account names are prohibited and may result in permanent account suspension.
> Github has changed their policy in 2022.
Which means that in the age of supply chain attacks, they patched the holes.
Which is exactly why this policy that AUR has is terrible in 2026.
The fact that GitHub didn't have that policy back in 2015 isn't the counterexample that the argumentative crowd here seems to think it is.
That is the GH policy right NOW, in the year of our Dog, 2026.
AUR is pretty grossly behind the curve, and I'll certainly accept that GH was arguably slow about it.
Defending AUR's policy on the basis of GH's policy being shitty until relatively recently isn't a good argument.
Meanwhile sometime around there I changed my GitHub username, and not reading up on the suggested process before doing so. The idea was to rename my account, then create a new account with the previous username, so no one else could squat it, as it's my firstname + lastname and the combination seems unique in the world, so it's basically just me. But a few seconds after renaming the account, it got squatted and even requesting to GitHub to reclaim it somehow, has fallen on deaf ears.
Lesson learned, create new accounts and never rename usernames, regardless of what rules the platform might share publicly.