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A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

serpapi.com

41–50 of 336 posts

Re: A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

#42

That sounds like a major, incredibly dangerous update to the DB driver. Their 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 versions seem to all have breaking changes [1]. Yet they are in obvious violation of SemVer expectations, which they declare to follow [2]: > Mongoid follows versioning guidelines as outlined by the Semantic Versioning Specification, so you can expect only backwards incompatible changes in major versions [sic] [1] https://docs…

Semantic Versioning does not mean you can update without reading the changelog. Blame here remains with the developer who updated without reading the changelog.

Re: A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

#43

If every breaking change would lead to more income we'd be doing so well. What on Earth were they thinking, to change the default behavior for something that is in production use for so long. This was monumentally stupid, even if it is a windfall for the OP, it could have easily gone the other way. And props for figuring out what it was, likely there are some other people scratching their heads about this.

> After refunding everyone, we manually double checked the billing state of each account one by one and sent emails to apologize to each customer one by one; all 475 of them.

Re: A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

#44
post #35

Here's how true professionals would handle this: "We recently became aware of some erroneous subscription renewals made by our platform and traced the root cause to a major bug in downstream database technology affecting a very small number of accounts. Nonetheless, we working hard with our database provider to resolve the issue. In the meantime, if you are affected and believe you might have an unsolicited subscript…

Aside from being more modern than to suggest a fax, that seems to be exactly what they did?

Re: A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mongoid follows versioning guidelines as outlined by the Semantic Versioning Specification, so you can expect only backwards incompatible changes in major versions I will note that this reverses the direction of implications. In SemVer, you should expect breaking changes only in major versions. (All version changes with breaking changes should be major, but nonbreaking changes can occur in major or minor versions.)…

I'm guessing the sentence they wrote is just a consequence of English not being the author's primary language. I frequently see ESL speakers get adjective and adverb positions wrong in ways that unintentially change the meaning. Even skilled English speakers make mistakes here because English is both very permissive about word order, but also tends to give different shades of meaning to each other. "Only" is a pernic…

There is a real parallel between this mistake and the or() mistake. As a native English speaker I glossed over both of them at the first reading.

Re: A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

#46

That sounds like a major, incredibly dangerous update to the DB driver. Their 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 versions seem to all have breaking changes [1]. Yet they are in obvious violation of SemVer expectations, which they declare to follow [2]: > Mongoid follows versioning guidelines as outlined by the Semantic Versioning Specification, so you can expect only backwards incompatible changes in major versions [sic] [1] https://docs…

Semantic Versioning does not mean you can update without reading the changelog. Blame here remains with the developer who updated without reading the changelog.

[deleted]

Re: A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

#48
post #35

Here's how true professionals would handle this: "We recently became aware of some erroneous subscription renewals made by our platform and traced the root cause to a major bug in downstream database technology affecting a very small number of accounts. Nonetheless, we working hard with our database provider to resolve the issue. In the meantime, if you are affected and believe you might have an unsolicited subscript…

"Heh heh, by the time those suckers realize we didn't give them the last 4 digits of the phone number, we'll be on a plane to Belize!"

Re: A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

#49
post #43

If every breaking change would lead to more income we'd be doing so well. What on Earth were they thinking, to change the default behavior for something that is in production use for so long. This was monumentally stupid, even if it is a windfall for the OP, it could have easily gone the other way. And props for figuring out what it was, likely there are some other people scratching their heads about this.

> After refunding everyone, we manually double checked the billing state of each account one by one and sent emails to apologize to each customer one by one; all 475 of them.

Yes, now imagine the other way around. How are you going to tell your users that you screwed up and will need to invoice them either again, or much closer to their next charge. Or maybe much later still if you don't spot the error right away.

Note that my comment isn't about the OP, but about the root cause of the breaking change: the driver.

Re: A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

#50
Serpapi definitely did the right thing here. Shame on the maintainers for introducing such a breaking change in a minor version update. I guess the takeaways are: - review change logs for any gems that are updated - have extensive test cases for anything that charges customers

Hindsight is always 20/20 of course.

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