The docs for GitHub pages need to be amended to acknowledge old .github.com user repos as a source of issues

[ssokolow]

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I went in circles for a month, including the HTTPS diagnosis agent (and even opened a fruitless ticket with a real human who didn't notice the problem either), until the "Before you submit that support ticket" Copilot accidentally sent me down the right route, because of a hole in the GitHub Pages docs that should probably get at least a "Note" admonition:

If your account is so old that your user/organization GitHub Pages is still being served from a repository named <SOMETHING>.github.com, it needs to be renamed to <SOMETHING>.github.io for TLS provisioning to work.

I laboriously double-checked every sentence in https://docs.github.com/en/pages/configuring-a-custom-domain-for-your-github-pages-site/ and the pages it references and it's not there. (The docs only mention the value for the CNAME record, not that it's not good enough that GitHub is serving your .com repo at the new .io subdomain.)

...and while I'm at it, here are the other things that had me chasing my tail for a month:

1. The agent explicitly promoted for diagnosing TLS issues doesn't catch this problem. Only the full Copilot that kicked in when I was trying to open a support ticket knew about it.

2. It'd help if the docs reminded the user that, for user/organization-level domains, the repo-level settings being referenced for triggering a re-check do still exist... on the <NAME>.github.io repo.

3. It'd help even more if the Settings page for project repos also had a line saying something like "Some custom domain settings are being inherited from [link to user/organization repo]" when the custom domain is being inherited like that, since I forgot to check ssokolow/ssokolow.github.com, but did look in ssokolow/quicktile's Settings to see if there was anything relevant.

4. Changing "If you point your custom subdomain to your apex domain" to "If you point your custom subdomain to your apex domain instead of to github.io" (i.e. adding "instead of to github.io") in the Note about custom subdomains so that sleep-deprived individuals don't have to read it multiple times to realize it's not in contradiction with the previous message that "www. redirecting to the apex domain" is a supported configuration.

5. "Any additional A, AAAA, ALIAS, ANAME records with the @ host, or CNAME records pointing to your www subdomain or other custom subdomain that you would like to use with GitHub Pages may prevent the HTTPS certificate from generating." in https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/securing-your-github-pages-site-with-https can be worrying if the user is struggling to find the source of a problem. It'd help to explicitly clarify that "Using CNAME records to define additional subdomains not directed at GitHub Pages will not cause problems."

[github-actions[bot]]

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