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Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

52 points by modzu ↗ HN
GitHub informed us of something supposedly new: we could upgrade our pro personal account to a free organization account. Yay! Quoting the github page: "Everything the personal account has"... plus more fine grained permissions control.

Note the upgrade is a one-way process. Thinking it was free so why not upgrade we did.

Except we had a wiki. With a lot of valuable information. Which is now gone:

While its not documented anywhere in the happy sounding announcement, wikis aren't included in the free organization plan. Bye data! Or if you need it, thanks for upgrading your $4 plan into a more expensive one. All the best, Microsoft.

19 comments

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ocdtrekkie
Have you contacted their customer support? I wonder if the data is still there, or can be recovered out somehow.
Havoc
>contacted their customer suppor

The fact that this is even necessary just screams monumental f up.

Here is a free upgrade. (With surprise data loss)

rvz
Well a loss of control of your own data on someone else's service isn't a feature and should be something you should be expecting (create backups of your own data more often), yet as soon as everyone takes the 'free' upgrade bait on a third-party service, then 'all bets are off' including Github.

Seriously for organizations, you're better of in self-hosting your own projects on-premise with open-source alternatives like GitLab (recommended), cgit or even Gerrit to avoid nonsense like 'centralising everything to GitHub' in the long term. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406

TimTheTinker
Seriously, you should store wiki pages as .md files in a /wiki folder in your repo, regardless of your git repo hosting provider. I'm positive wiki pages are stored in a separate git repo alongside your code, anyway.

The more that lives in the codebase itself, the better -- ideally this would not only include wiki pages, but also issues, comments, PR threads, etc.

tedivm
Github treats wikis as another git repository. I regularly use this to backup the wikis I have on github.

If your project is named `username/repository` then your wiki can be cloned at `git clone git@github.com:username/repository.wiki.git`.

ribadeodev
This approach is something I never quite figured out. What is the point of documenting your project in another repository? Based on what OP just explained this is one of the only explanations I can come up with (GitHub treats this as an extra that you must pay for).
modzu
i like this advice
neamtua
But it is documented and from the very beginning. If you look at this page https://github.com/pricing in the comparison table under Pages and Wiki it clearly says "Public repositories". I'm guessing you had a private one. I've also moved from Pro to Free Teams and I've seen this from the start.
modzu
Here is another bait-and-switch type announcement, for GitHub Actions:

Original announcement: 10,000 per month

Starting next month: 3,000 per month

:/

chrisgoman
Yup, nobody in all the announcements or any other articles mentioning this new "github" has mentioned the WIKI (which is part of Gitlab) is not included in the free part of Github ... this is kind of critical IMHO
verdverm
Really, the wiki is one of the worst features. Markdown based docs are far better and actually part of the repository
ocdtrekkie
The project I work on uses both: In-repo docs as the authoritative/reference on the software, and the wiki as a collaboration tool with a low barrier of entry to users adding things.
chrisgoman
We have non-developers so they can handle markdown but not much beyond that ... having a website where they can type stuff (this is just like wikipedia) helps us get them onboarded .. then they also can help with the issues, etc.
app4soft
> Note the upgrade is a one-way process.

It reminds me migrating own GitHub repo Travis CI from https://travis-ci.org to https://travis-ci.com, which is also one-way process.

Some of my repo older still use travis-ci.org (ORG domain is cool here), but all new GitHub repos could be linked only to travis-ci.com (COM domain little terrible)

Havoc
Been toying with joining github, but think I'll stick with self-hosting gitlab after all
cdybenko
I'm the PM on Wiki at GitLab - sorry to hear this happened to you! If you ever did consider moving to our free tier at GitLab, our GitHub Importer (in the docs) should handle importing the whole project including the wiki. You'd still need access to your GitHub wiki though so can't say for sure.