I was hoping to create a team/organization through https://github.com/organizations/plan but when trying to use the account name I want (e.g. example-org) it states that the name is already taken. The strange thing is that visiting https://github.com/example-org returns a 404 when using the account name I’d like to use.
Any ideas?
I’m don’t know how the page https://github.com/example-org looked when you visited, but for me it looks like this now:
Which shows that the organization with name example-org is taken, it only hasn’t any public repositories yet (but it may have private repos etc.).
When you request a profile page of some organization that really doesn’t exist, GitHub shows a proper 404 page as expected (e.g. https://github.com/not-existing-organization):
The example-org was an example. I’m seeing the 404 page for the organization name I’m actually trying to register but the form doesn’t let me register it.
Hi everyone,
I wanted to just leave a quick explanation here as I find this quite interesting.
This phenomenon whereby the system won’t let you register a username but there’s no profile at the URL can happen for a couple of reasons.
Most commonly the username being tried is using unsupported characters.
Some usernames are simply unavailable because of namespacing (go to https://github.com/mac for example)
There are some other internal reasons this can happen but I think the above are the most common.
Definitely reach out if you would like more information on whether a potential username is available because it’s not showing up.
Cheers,
Billy
