YJL

Recently, I have grown even more bored, so I began to watch GitHub Public Timeline, hoped to spot something interesting. And I sort of did, if you use GitHub, how many of you have thought of that you can abuse GitHub? I used to think that “Report Abuse” option in profile page isn’t useful, now I’ve used it.

This was what I saw:

The first entry was a page like this:

Those links were linked to Amazon, referral links. I wonder if I can report this to Amazon to get that referral ID banned. Probably not.

And this guy had made plenty of pages:

I reported the account before I went to bed. Next morning, I read a reply from GitHub saying they would investigate. The repository was deleted, but the account isn’t banned.

Before this, it had never occurred to me that someone could use GitHub as content farm. Yes, I have seen for blogs, writing platform, collaboration, resumé, LOL repositories, even for having a boyfriend¹, things might have anything to do with coding directly, but they were legitimate. Not like this, with intention to make money by abusing a system.

It’s an abuse, because that wiki contained a lot of pages and the account only registered within 1 day (11/14/2012). There is no way those were man-made, they must be computer generated. Computer generated content doesn’t mean bad, but that account spammed lots of page in short time, it’s bad.

I saw one or two entries at least every refresh on public timeline. The content must be stolen from websites, I didn’t even need to check, I know they were.

They are everywhere, even in nerd realm.

[1]	https://github.com/norinori2222/boyfriend_require is gone.