GitHub block list management

Octocrabby is a small set of command-line tools and Octocrab extensions that are focused on managing block lists on GitHub. This project was inspired by an open letter supporting Richard Stallman, which has been signed by several thousand GitHub users I don't want to accidentally donate free open source support to.

This project may eventually get merged into cancel-culture, which is currently focused on archiving and block list management for Twitter.

Usage

This project is made of Rust, and you currently need Rust and Cargo installed to use it. If you've followed these instructions and cloned this repo locally, you can build the CLI by running the following command from the project directory:

$ cargo build --release
   Compiling bytes v1.0.1
   ...
   Compiling octocrabby v0.1.0 (/home/travis/projects/octocrabby)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 1m 35s

Most operations require a GitHub personal access token, which you currently have to provide as a command-line option. If you want to use the mass-blocking functionality, you'll need to select the user scope when creating your token. If you only want to generate reports or export your follower or block lists, that shouldn't be necessary. The following examples assume that this has been exported to the environment variable GH_TOKEN.

Contributor reports

One operation that doesn't require a personal access token is list-pr-contributors:

$ target/release/crabby -vvvv list-pr-contributors -r rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.github.io > data/rms-support-letter-contributors.csv

If no token is provided, this command will output a CSV document with a row for each GitHub user who contributed a pull request to the given repository. Each row will have three columns:

1. GitHub username
2. GitHub user ID
3. Number of PRs for this repository

For example:

0312birdzhang,1762041,1
0hueliSJWpidorasi,81465353,1
0kalekale,31927746,1
0ver3inker,53104897,1
0x0000ff,1977210,1

If you provide a personal access token to this command (via -t), the output will include several additional columns:

1. GitHub username
2. GitHub user ID
3. Number of PRs for this repo
4. Number of days between account creation and the first PR to this repo
5. The user's name (if available)
6. The Twitter handle provided by the user (if available)
7. A boolean indicating whether you follow this user
8. A boolean indicating whether this user follows you

For example:

01012,14347178,2,2019,,,false,false
0312birdzhang,1762041,1,3229,BirdZhang,,false,false
0MazaHacka0,11509345,1,2204,Dmitry Abakumov,,false,false
0hueliSJWpidorasi,81465353,1,0,,,false,false
0kalekale,31927746,1,1288,kalekale,,false,false
0mid,288476,1,3958,,,false,false
0rhan,33350605,2,1241,Orhan Gurbanov,,false,false
0ver3inker,53104897,1,617,0ver3inker,0ver3inker,false,false
0x0000-dot-ru,1397843,2,3343,Dmitriy Balakin,,false,false
0x0000ff,1977210,1,3176,,,false,false

Please note that GitHub does not verify that the Twitter handle provided by a GitHub user in their GitHub profile is owned by that user (or that it exists, etc.), so that field should not be used for automated blocking on Twitter. You can omit that column from the output by providing --omit-twitter.

You can find copies of the output of this command in this project's data directory.

This allows us to see how many of the signatories were using single-purpose throwaway accounts, for example. As of this morning, only 82 of the 3,000+ accounts were created on the same day they opened their PR:

$ awk -F, '$4 == 0' data/rms-support-letter-contributors.csv | wc
     82     102    3282

You can also check how many of the signers follow you on GitHub:

$ egrep -r "true,(true|false)$" data/rms-support-letter-contributors.csv | wc
      0       0       0

And how many you follow:

$ egrep -r "true$" data/rms-support-letter-contributors.csv | wc
      0       0       0

Good.

Follow and block list export

The CLI also allows you to export lists of users you follow, are followed by, and block:

$ target/release/crabby -vvvv -t $GH_TOKEN list-following | wc
     24      24     408

$ target/release/crabby -vvvv -t $GH_TOKEN list-followers | wc
    575     575   10416

$ target/release/crabby -vvvv -t $GH_TOKEN list-blocks | head
alexy,27491
soc,42493
jdegoes,156745
vmarquez,427578
gvolpe,443978
neko-kai,450507
hmemcpy,601206
kubukoz,894884
propensive,1024588
phderome,11035032

The format is a two-column CSV with username and user ID.

It's also possible to export the block list of an organization you administer by adding --org $MY_ORG to the list-blocks command (note that this requires your token to have the read:org scope enabled).

In general it's probably a good idea to save the output of the list-blocks command before using the mass-blocking functionality in the next section.

Mass blocking

The CLI also includes a block-users command that accepts CSV rows from standard input. It ignores all columns except the first, which it expects to be a GitHub username. This is designed to make it convenient to save the output of list-pr-contributors, manually remove accounts if needed, and then block the rest.

target/release/crabby -vvv -t $GH_TOKEN block-users < data/rms-support-letter-contributors.csv
15:17:36 [WARN] Skipping 3936 known blocked users
15:17:36 [INFO] Successfully blocked Aliaksei-Tatarynchyk
...

If you've set the logging level to at least WARN (via the -vvv or -vvvv options), it will show you a message for each user who is blocked. Note that if you've blocked thousands of accounts or are running the script on a repository for the first time, it may be faster to include the --force option, which doesn't download your current block list, but simply requests a block for each user.

It's also possible to block a list of users on behalf of an organization that you administer by adding --org $MY_ORG to the block-users command (assuming your token has write:org enabled).

Other tools

You can view all currently supported commands with -h:

crabby 0.1.0
Travis Brown <travisrobertbrown@gmail.com>

USAGE:
    crabby [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <SUBCOMMAND>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -v, --verbose    Logging verbosity
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -t, --token <token>    A GitHub personal access token (not needed for all operations)

SUBCOMMANDS:
    block-users             Block a list of users provided in CSV format to stdin
    check-follow            Check whether one user follows another
    help                    Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    list-blocks             List accounts the authenticated user blocks in CSV format to stdout
    list-followers          List the authenticated user's followers in CSV format to stdout
    list-following          List accounts the authenticated user follows in CSV format to stdout
    list-pr-contributors    List PR contributors for the given repository

Caveats and future work

I wrote this thing yesterday afternoon. It's completely untested. It might not work. For your own safety please don't use it with a personal access token with unneeded permissions (i.e. anything except user).

It's probably possible to include the account age in the contributor report even when unauthenticated—I just wasn't able to find a way to get information about multiple users via a single request except through the GraphQL endpoint, which is only available to authenticated users (and if you request each user individually, you'll run into GitHub's rate limits for projects like the Stallman support letter).

Related projects

• highlight-rms-supporters is a userscript that highlights signers of the Stallman support letter in the browser

License

This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0. See the LICENSE file for details.