The OP clearly says, "It’s my fault for not reading the fine print more carefully."
They then further go on to say, "... when upgrading back to a Pro account, any branch protection rules you had before were permanently deleted when you downgraded to the free tier. They will all have to be recreated from scratch."
That is useful information, to me. People write blog posts about all types of things that are obvious to some and useful to others. Why be so nasty about this short post that seems to be useful to a lot of people? I guess that's 2019 for ya.
It's easy to ask snarky questions. That doesn't mean it's helpful or witty.
I admit that my rather sarcastic comment was a bit snarky. I am genuinely surprised though that people find this newsworthy. It's pretty obvious that if you're going to downgrade anything you'll lose something, no? I also find it very surprising that the OP was so astound that the lost triggers had to be re-configured if he was to upgrade again. Maybe it's just me, but this really felt pretty standard and extremely obvious, which is maybe why I wrote this rather snarky comment. Still wrong of me, so I take that feedback.
Amazing. I expected you to double-down and reply aggressively defensive, but that was a sincere, thoughtful reply. Thank you. Maybe 2019 isn't so bad after all. ;)
And I agree it's a fairly obvious risk if you stop and think about it, but it's not necessarily true that losing access to a feature, which is a reversible state, also permanently deletes all configuration data associated with that feature.
Your comment was direct, but fair, so it wasn't difficult to agree with you ;)
Regarding the branch protection feature, I can see it both ways, but I think overall I would have not expected them to be re-instantiated when upgrading to a higher tier again. Branches could have changed since then. I could have added more branches, deleted a branch which previously had the protection, then maybe created a new branch under the same name, etc.
Unless it's an immediate "I accidentally downgraded, revert all changes back again" action I think it's easier for GitHub to just let the user re-create what makes the most sense for them at the point of re-joining the higher tier. But like with most user features it's debatable...
GitHub is likely among the most widely used tools for HN users. Posting on HN, news that is relevant to such a majority of users on this platform, is a rather perfect use of HN as a dissemination platform. I read through GitHub's tiered service documentation after reading this article, and I couldn't find reference to branch controls being permanently deleted; so the OP was giving us very valuable experiential information, that was unattainable from GitHub. I really can't think of a better use for HN.
They then further go on to say, "... when upgrading back to a Pro account, any branch protection rules you had before were permanently deleted when you downgraded to the free tier. They will all have to be recreated from scratch."
That is useful information, to me. People write blog posts about all types of things that are obvious to some and useful to others. Why be so nasty about this short post that seems to be useful to a lot of people? I guess that's 2019 for ya.
It's easy to ask snarky questions. That doesn't mean it's helpful or witty.