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Article Publishing
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~ could github be abused as website rollback system |
Github (and git in general) is used for storage of source code mostly.
What if people started (ab)using it for website backups? A wiki, web forum, or blog, could use it as a revision system. You could roll back your blog/wiki/forum to any point in time, to say defend against spam and roll it back to a better state. Or if your forum content becomes corrupt, again you could roll it back..
But git and github may have never been originally designed for this purpose.
What would github's terms and conditions say about such use of their service? And there are more issues: licensing the content, if it is copyright to your own domain name.
Despite these potential issues, it's still an interesting idea that someone will for sure take advantage of one day, if they haven't already: github not just for source code, but for all text data.
Indeed you see projects like open hardware txt files being stored (designs of hardware) that are not source files but specification, design, and description files. But what if github could roll your website back? Kind of like an archive.org that you control with your hands...
Some times tools are not designed for multiple purposes but end up being used as such...
And it's not that difficult to do a prototype, just make your web application call a git command line or execute the git process, and try backing up a file...
But will github or other companies using git, have to start charging for this service? After all github is intended for source files, not backing up busy websites every 10 seconds when someone posts.
And you don't have to do git backups every time someone posts something on an interactive website, you could just decide to github it every 3 days, or 6 hours, etc.
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