Explanation on "How to claim these accounts"

[dskbrd]

First of all thank you for the effort of creating this tool and the list published here.

My Question is:
How would you go forward to try and claim one of these inactive account names?
Is there some kind of workflow from Github for this usecase or do you have to contact the support directly?

[terror]

Your welcome! Yes you are right, you would need to contact support.

If the account is truly inactive (there is a possibility that it isn't) they will free it for you.

[bloatoo]

How would you actually contact them? Their system is confusing

[terror]

How would you actually contact them? Their system is confusing

Hi @bloatoo!

They have a contact form -> https://support.github.com/contact

[bloatoo]

What is it that I should do there? Trying to send them a request in the ways that I've figured has always been a dead end. There's also no straight-up way of sending them an email or something

[terror]

What is it that I should do there? Trying to send them a request in the ways that I've figured has always been a dead end. There's also no straight-up way of sending them an email or something

Your best bet is that form -- if the account is truly inactive and the request is pure, you'll have no problem.

[bloatoo]

Got you. Which one of the topics should I choose? None of them include username squatting, and picking "Report abuse or spam" should be done from the user's profile. And even if I was to do it from the user's profile, it wouldn't give me a chance to send the request

[terror]

Got you. Which one of the topics should I choose? None of them include username squatting, and picking "Report abuse or spam" should be done from the user's profile. And even if I was to do it from the user's profile, it wouldn't give me a chance to send the request

I don't see any topics to be chosen from on the form? All you need is a simple subject and body detailing your request.

[bloatoo]

The page looks like this, what should I do from here?

[terror]

The page looks like this, what should I do from here?

Is that what you get when you visit https://support.github.com/contact ?

[bloatoo]

Yup.

[terror]

Yup.

I would just go with account or billing issues. They will do their best to handle the request regardless of the topic I assume.

[bloatoo]

Got you, thanks

Apparently, GitHub has updated its username policy and is no longer accepting requests to release dormant usernames.

[poundsigntown]

Yeah... they even added a "category" in the contact form dropdown, it seems, for no other reason than just to trigger this dialog when its selected: