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GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

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Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#71

Post by seba_dos1 »

bmlzootown wrote: post #70
tony wrote: post #5

The toothpaste is out of the tube - notifications are going to be scrutinized more in the future, from this point on. I got the email. And about 20+ responses to that email. Every person who replies to that issue triggers another 400k emails. Personally, my email client is crashing. EpicGames, as a GitHub org is an outlier, it's basically an SSO for Unreal Engine. I forgot I was even a member of it.

I'm up to about 156 replies between two emails now. My phone and smart watch were buzzing like crazy earlier for each notification.

That's where it ended.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#73

Post by saghm »

jmcgough wrote: post #19

My freshman class (~4000) at university was sent an email by administrators via the freshman class mailing list. Someone replied, which lead to their email being sent to the entire mailing list... another email asking to be removed from the mailing list, etc, suddenly everyone was hit by a deluge of hundreds of emails asking to be removed. Getting real flashbacks to that from the snarky / annoyed comments on this :)

I had this happen at my job maybe six months ago? It was surreal because I'm young enough that I knew the trope from TV shows and stuff from the late 90s/early 2000s of people not knowing when to use "reply" instead of "reply all" but never actually had to deal with it by the time I grew up and starting working.

The only thing more amusing than all of the people replying asking to be taken off the list is all the people who reply to tell everyone else to stop replying, as if that would solve the problem instead of making it worse.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#75

Post by oddity »

nlewycky wrote: post #53
fortran77 wrote: post #23

I don't get this comment on github: > Lock it. Lock it now. This is the friendliest message I'm going to send, while I look for ways to get OP banned from Github for gross social misconduct. I imagine that "owner of bots universe" might be enough to get that account tagged as a bot, who knows how many communities across however many repositories that person just bothered across all of Github. Wasn't the message send…

The original PR did nothing but add grammar errors to the README, with a mismatching PR description and title, then demanded that it actually be merged. I read this as a way to waste people's time, from there it's just a question of how many people. This user's bad intentions colour their entire interaction, both the deliberate and accidental parts, because this accident would not have happened if they weren't screwi…

The PR is undeniably silly, but it's totally plausible that some people just have bad ideas and not bad intent.

The situation doesn't need any more escalation beyond fixing the underlying vector for spam.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#76

Post by cyral »

nop_slide wrote: post #29

There are quite a few other, uh, interesting PRs for that repo. https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pulls https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pull/10/files https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pull/18/files What is going on?

Looks like Hacktoberfest PRs

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#77

Post by rgoulter »

dandongus wrote: post #32

can someone explain how this isn't the intended behavior?

Sending email notifications to 400,000 users for unimportant things is antisocial. (If 0.1% of those users then reply on the thread, it'd be another 400 comments sent to all 400,000 recipients).

I don't think anyone sits down and thinks the intentional behaviour should be "we should make it easy for someone to send a notification email to 400,000 people". That would clearly be annoying.

I think the behaviour is accidental, arising from "notifying all people in a team is useful".

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#78

Post by markus_zhang »

Is there a warning when someone @ a huge number of users?

Actually if one is never supposed to send notification to a large group, what's the point of creating such a group? I assume that maybe there is some admin value but then again the admin will trigger a notification storm, no?

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#79

Post by Sirened »

kenrose wrote: post #41
spike021 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something similar happened at Cisco something like maybe 5 years ago? Someone sent the Bay Area employees or whatever list (probably at least some tens of thousands of employees) an ask for a cook/chef they could hire to make meals for their family, IIRC. I think the reply-all's happened all week.

MS in 2005 as well.

And Apple in 1991 [1]. It's a very fun story actually, good read if you're in the business of writing "reliable" or "recoverable" software (aka pretty much everyone). A bad design choice in sendmail caused a cascading explosion of emails. I also highly recommend reading the rest of the book (?), the Unix Hater's Handbook is a wonderful bit of history and discussion of the design issues of the NIXs we all know and love/hate today.

[1] https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf page 85

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#80

Post by ushakov »

nop_slide wrote: post #29

There are quite a few other, uh, interesting PRs for that repo. https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pulls https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pull/10/files https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pull/18/files What is going on?

Hacktoberfest flashbacks intensifies

https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/

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