Hi GitLab , Today is not a very happy day in my life. My account was closed on GitHub.
Vanilla-RTB was forced out. Almost 3000 lines of code and 26 stars were lost.
I haven’t got a clear explanation why , but I think due to only one competitor with 800 stars and
really hard to understand code ( check for your self RTBkit ) , I can clearly understand what triggered the closure
of my account: competitor me was eliminated in one go.
I had to port all my code into GitLab from GitHub and I will have to spend enormous amount of time
getting my .travis.yml ported into .gitlab-ci.yml.
But before I do that , can someone answer a simple question.
If I find out that someone has an interest in Real-time bidding ( Demand Side Platforms ) and
I would send him/her personal email, would that be considered as bad as to block/cancel my account on GitLab ?
Looks like GitLab is my last chance to survive , I spent 3 years maintaining my GitHub account and did
quite few pull requests into someone elses repo to find later that my account no longer exist.
So, I am hoping to get some answers on this forum if that’s OK to do .
I am not talking about scraping by API and sending 100K emails , I am talking about selective process which
may take me 2-3 hours a day to find potential users of my framework by looking at their public activity .
can someone answer my question please ?
Best,
Vlad.
I wouldn’t do that, personally. It’s still going to come across as unsolicited, and if enough of those recipients don’t like your message and report you then your account would be blocked again (probably automatically, without any human intervention).
Why not setup a landing page website for your product/platform (something which isn’t tied to your Git repository) and then use that to gather details through a simple form? It can also build search engine rankings so that people who are actually looking for something like your platform will know how to find it. That will stop you from losing all your traffic if you do happen to get banned from Gitlab for whatever reason (or if you decide to migrate your code elsewhere in the future). You can also create a page providing a comparison between your software and your competitor, that might boost your traffic too.
Make it as easy as possible for your potential users to find you, don’t “cold-call” people who you think might be interested.
I wish I was warned , but banning was way too much, don’t you think ?
The other problem is advertising on website not associated with GitHub or GitLab is a bit strange and inconvenient.
I got all my github.io pages on GitHub and I push my changes and immediately my website is refreshed , so promoting my source code outside of open-source community would not be successful.
And when you say unsolicited , the user did not have to leave his/her email address on his/her profile .
What was the reason the user left it out , for other users to contact, right ? That was my interpretation of intent.
If I don’t want to be contacted I simply remove email from my profile.
And believe me I get 1000 emails per day and I can set up a filter if I want to ignore email, so sending complain
to github was a bit too much. just reply that you are not interested , and thats it.
We only sent one email to the group by bcc .
Clearly to me there is something else behind this attack on our project.
One thing I know is that our rival is the only open source in C++ that exists , we used to be listed right below them, and
here on GitLab not a single soul that writes code in this domain ( real-time bidding )
The idea of open-source to me is you fork it , improve it , leave it open-sourced for community .
But when I see these open source companies get monetized ( RTBkit) that’s when the software dies.
I take your comment very seriously and will discuss it with my contributors , it got us by surprise today, but
I think we leaned the lesson.
Thank you for suggestion!
Best,
Vladimir.