Using this action caused account suspension due to TOS violation

Last week I used this action more-or-less as intended: I was having a hard time debugging my failing Actions job, so I added the lines

- name: Debug with tmate on failure
  if: ${{ failure() }}
  uses: mxschmitt/action-tmate@v3

to my script and clicked on the link in the Actions console to open a session on the Actions VM. I typed one or two commands (printing env vars and the like), disconnected, and killed the job in the console.

After doing so, my account was automatically suspended by Github for TOS violation. Since I’m the owner of my company’s organization, our org was also flagged. I’ve spent the last week going back-and-forth with GH support, attempting to restore my account and remove the flag from our org. After 6 days, GH support finally informed me that master.tmate.io is a flagged DNS and was the reason for my account suspension.

I’m surprised no one else has experienced this issue. I’m not sure whether you can update the DNS to something allowed by GH, but this experience has scared me away from using this Action.

[Steve-Glass]

@brian-skintelligent

Hi! I’m with the Actions product team and I’m sorry to hear you’ve had to go through this ordeal. We have been investigating this behavior and how it has been impacting customers. We’ve implemented some changes that will allow you to debug your job using SSH/RDP and there is a 30 minute window before the the job will be cancelled. Please let me know if our changes have not resolved your use case and we will investigate immediately.

[brian-skintelligent]

I agree with @PatTheMav that this is a very helpful Action; debugging Actions with print statements is excruciating. But my account was suspended for TOS violation, and this Action is definitely the reason. That’s what support said, and I’ve been able to successfully run the same Action script without mxschmitt/action-tmate@v3 many times since my account was restored.