Response from Martin Woodward, GitHub’s VP of Developer Relations:
Sorry for the inconvenience @koepnick - while searching across all repos has required being logged in for a long time, when we enhanced the search capabilities earlier in the 2023 we had to extend this to repos as well (see https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/).
This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.
Anyone without access to their old email also loses their account. I don’t remember which email address I used with my account back in the day (it’s at least ten years old), and since I bought my key from a reseller, I don’t have a receipt. Microsofts response was basically “not our problem, guess you’ll have to pay us again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
But this is true for literally anything that requires email verification to login with?
I think msft is scummy here but let’s not pretend it’s unusual that a company isn’t going to help you if you can’t access your email to verify your ownership.
If I lose access to my Gmail account and am unable to login to Amazon bc of that Amazon ain’t going to help me.
In Minecraft’s case, you never needed the email address beyond initial registration. Login was always through username and password, which I still have. Had I actually forgotten my credentials, that would’ve been fair, but I didn’t. They just suddenly decided that that wasn’t enough and they now want some ancient email address that little me had typed in once over ten years ago.