What happened to your old Leetcode repository
XtraSonic opened this issue · 2 comments
Hello,
Sorry for opening an issue here, but I didn't know how else I could ask you this question.
I recently found out about leetcode and I challenged myself to solve at least one problem each day (from the free version for now). I also decided to store my work on github along with a readme in which I put both the text of the problem and how I went about solving it (mostly for my future reference). I was sure I was not the first one to come up with the idea of having the solutions on github and I wanted to see how other people structured their repository and that's how I found yours.
I noticed that in your README you you said "R.I.P. to my old Leetcode repository, where there were 5.7k+ stars and 2.2k+ forks (ever the top 3 in the field). Since free questions may be even mistakenly taken down by some companies, only solutions will be post on now." My aim is not to get stars or forks, but I did want to save the text of the problems that I solved next to my thoughts in order to have everything in one place so I wanted to ask:
Was your previous repo taken down solely because of the text of a problem (which is also publicly available for free on Leetcode as well) or were there other things that lead to the termination of that repo? Also, what would you recommend, should I stop saving the text of the problems ?
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In the past, some free public problem descriptions on Leetcode may have been copied directly or indirectly from some other copyright-protected online interview sites. It may be hard to know where the problem description came from until you get a DMCA takedown notice. Neither popular search engines can find its source since the source pages are private.
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If you paste the whole problem description without knowing its source, solely a short free public description in a file is the same, the copyright holder may file a DMCA takedown notice and disable the access to your whole repository without warning. The good news is that Github recently updated its policy and will give repository owners a chance to make changes before processing the DMCA takedown notice, and there is less chance of encountering this issue. You can see Github DMCA.
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I would recommend that you do not publicly save the original problem description from Leetcode to avoid this risk. Maybe you can publicly save a modified/simplified one or make the repository private. Taking notes of thought process, complexity analysis, and unit testing is great. Happy coding every day. 👍
Thank you very much for all the information :D