Apology for Repository Visibility Changes That Caused Stars to Disappear

[uiolee]

Hi everyone,

I want to sincerely apologize for the accidental changes of visibility from public to private in our important repository hexojs/hexo earlier today. Which means we lost all watchers, all forks and around 40K stars.

While using the GitHub CLI, I intended to change the visibility of one of my own personal repositories. However, I executed the gh repo edit shell command in the wrong working directory and mistakenly changed the hexojs/hexo from public to private.
As a result, the repository lost its stars, watchers, forks.

Now I have changed the repository back to public. But it seems that the number of stars and watchers won't be restored.

This was entirely my mistake, I take full responsibility for the error. I’m truly sorry for the disruption and inconvenience to the project and everyone involved. It took more than 14 years of effort and contributions for this project to accumulate around 40K stars, and because of my mistake, we lost all of them. I truly feel deeply sorry and upset about what happened. I want to sincerely apologize to the founder of this project and to every member of the community.

I am very sorry.

• audit log
  

• shell history
  

@tommy351 @hexojs/core @hexojs/founder

[uiolee]

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[ZeroAurora]

the httpie story... :(

[SerJaimeLannister]

(I have come from hackernews and I wasn't aware of hexo, but because of this incident, I am aware of it and I wish it good luck within the future, I have starred it [36th star] and 1st fork of hexo!)

Please don't blame yourself too much about it. Mistakes happen. I also believe that it is partially Github's fault too for giving the cli capability to have such massive footguns, perhaps Github should even have a revertible way to get the stars and forks back given the honest nature of mistake but atleast that's my understanding but Github has been in hot water for so many things (namely the fact that its website itself is having like 86-87% uptime iirc) and so these might not be their priorities of Github team.

But I hope that you don't stress yourself about it, I wish nothing but the best for hexo in future and hope that the stars start piling soon again if you wish them but the real star has been the project all along!

[CSharperMantle]

I guess the UX mismatch between GitHub web UI vs. gh CLI is to blame here.

On the web UI, I get three confirmations when switching a repo to private, the final one being a text input that reads:

Warning: this is a destructive action

Making this repository private could erase these counts by removing stars and watchers associated to users that will no longer have access to this repository:

To confirm, type the number of stars on this repository in the box below

Some other actions, like archiving IIRC, require typing the "user/repo" name instead, but the idea holds.

However, in gh, as shown in your screenshot, there's no such explicit confirmation.

Would love to see if GH CLI would improve.

[iamCristYe]

Just a heads-up, contacting GitHub support may help.

[Ember-Moth]

Don't feel sorry about it. Everyone makes mistakes. Take it easy