I'm kinda surprised this wasn't already a thing - I've never seen a "buy viagra here" comment on GitHub so I assume they have had some anti spam system in place for ages.
It's used by humans. It will. Hopefully, such abuse will be characterised as just that, but it probably won't be because humans will judge the reports.
I think the reason you don't often see spam on GitHub is also a matter of convenience. While GitHub as a whole is very large, there are few people reading a specific issue, and posting spam elsewhere doesn't really make sense (nobody will look at your "buy-viagra-now" repo, nor will many people notice a new issue/PR called "Buy Viagra now"). And even then, you can assume that all readers are sufficiently tech-aware and won't fall for direct spam. From the spammers' point of view, you're wasting resources on a platform that has virtually zero chances of yielding visitors, as opposed to mail spamming which has higher chances in virtue of higher visibility and less conscious users.
You could report users beforehand and I think leave links to specific examples in the comment field. And there has to be some kind of automatic system as well.
Every single website that publishes user-generated content offers a method to report content.
I really have no idea how this merits to be top of the front page, except that github somehow ended up on everyone's naughty list because an intern once deleted content they misunderstood, and the company once mentioned their efforts to attract a more diverse workforce.
The tech community will always forgive and forget a company not noticing that none of their three backup systems are actually working, and then accidentally deleting user data.
But any small effort, ever, to join the society-wide effort to right historical wrongs will forever taint even the most benign actions with the collective accusation of politically-motivated censorship.
The universal truth that everyone, in every industry, is also a citizen who doesn't check their humanity at the company gates is now scandalized. And the common fiction that companies only serve the bottom line is not rejected as (a) wrong and (b) ahistorical ignorance, but glorified as the mantra of some sort of libertarian fantasy.
I don't think we have to be that cynical about it. This is an interesting feature because Github chose to feature it on their blog today, which suggests that the previous system for reporting was not well-known or well-understood.
> But any small effort, ever, to join the society-wide effort to right historical wrongs will forever taint even the most benign actions with the collective accusation of politically-motivated censorship.
Efforts to change society, particularly "righting" perceived historical wrongs is politics. That's not a value judgement as "politics" normally is, that's just what the word means. If you're removing or editing content based on this then it's politically motivated censorship, again that's not a value judgement, although censorship certainly has a negative connotation, it's just what these words mean in common parlance.
It's fine to feel that people should be politically censored, hopefully we can at least agree on the meanings of these words though.
