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GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

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Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#81

Post by bdn_ »

bityard wrote: post #64
antoineMoPa wrote: post #24

Fun fact: at some point I wrote @param in a PR comment, talking about a parameter's doc. I only realized after posting that there was an actual user named @param.

I have a two-letter github username and get tagged accidentally all the time. Also invitations to private repos.

I am @3x and I get ~10 notifications a day of people mentioning me in PRs and issues. Whenever anyone writes the name of a file containing `@3x`, which is commonly used for hi-res assets, I get a notification. I quickly learned to turn off email notifications!

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#82

Post by faustomorales »

Seems like an innocent enough mistake. Remind me of when I once helped organize a volunteer hackathon with people from different companies. We created a Slack organization just for the occasion. At the end of the event, I was supposed to ask all attendees to delete all the data we had given them before they went home. The message I posted to #general (the channel everyone in a Slack organization is required to be in) with @everyone tagged was something to the effect of:

"Thank you everyone for contributing to our shared mission. When you are done with your work today, please delete all the data from your machines. Hope we see each other again soon!"

Slack gave me a dire warning that my message would send notifications to so many people across so many time zones. This didn't surprise me because attendees came from various countries for the event. So I dismissed it.

But I had accidentally sent it to my company's Slack organization instead of the hackathon-specific one. I didn't realize it until a co-worker sent me a private message asking why I had just tried to fire everyone at our company.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#83

Post by srinathkrishna »

I empathize with that kid - his intentions were probably good but I'm pretty sure he didn't know this would have sent email notifications. Even if he had known, kid wouldn't have known that it is a bad bad thing. :D

Kid probably was creating a PR to brag tomorrow in school!

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#84

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

oefrha wrote: post #34
schappim wrote: post #12

And this is how it ended: EpicGames locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators now [1]. [1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/Shared-Image-2022-06-05-12-1...

It doesn’t really fix the “vulnerability” though? Some other jerk can open a new PR and tag everyone again. Or just tag @EpicGames/developers elsewhere, no PR needed.

The thing that gets me, as discussed in this thread, is that the solution is often just super easy. Literally just pop up a modal when the recipient list is above 1,000 users that says “You’re about to send this to X,000 users, Are You Sure?”

Would have totally avoided this situation.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#85

Post by ushakov »

gruez wrote: post #68
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?

Looking at the content of the OP and the PRs you linked, my first thought is "Is it Hacktoberfest[1] already?". I mean, seriously, what's up with the such low quality PRs? Is it common to have people spamming repos with trivial changes absent some sort of incentive? [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/digitalocean_hacktobe...

probably for resume?

“Contributed quality improvements to Epic Games Unreal Engine”

luckily, GitHub makes it terribly easy to verify how much and what you actually contributed

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#87

Post by zamadatix »

oefrha wrote: post #34
schappim wrote: post #12

And this is how it ended: EpicGames locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators now [1]. [1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/Shared-Image-2022-06-05-12-1...

It doesn’t really fix the “vulnerability” though? Some other jerk can open a new PR and tag everyone again. Or just tag @EpicGames/developers elsewhere, no PR needed.

Looks like they dealt with the tag too as https://github.com/orgs/EpicGames/teams/developers is showing not found

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#88

Post by chupasaurus »

markus_zhang wrote: post #78

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?

There isn't IIRC. And yeah, an ability to calling out public (semi-public in this case) groups is plain stupid. Even when you documented it [0]

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/get...

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#89

Post by YPPH »

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 :)

When we migrated from on-premises Microsoft Exchange to Office 365, the default "reply" button in OWA was switched from reply-to-one to "reply all".

After the CEO sent the first all-staff email on the new platform, we had at least three highly regrettable replies copied to the whole organisation, including one disclosing very confidential information intended only for the CEO.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#90

Post by woojoo666 »

smcleod wrote: post #66
gnufied wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah not sure why calls for getting the poster banned from Github - https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pull/24#issuecomment-114... . Seems bit excessive, murphy's law applies. Also the poster is essentially a kid. I would hold my judgement before flaming him fwiw.

Regardless of the mass notification or a bad quality PR - you don't just remove someone from a major internet platform like this, it's an inhumane response to someone making a mistake. Not to mention it's just a notification, who really cares unless it happens all the time which is just more of an argument to fix the platform behaviour. Some people are so high and mighty.

If it's possible for somebody to unintentionally piss off hundreds of thousands of people, that's not the person's fault. It's the system's. The internet allows proliferation of information at scale and speeds that can be disasterous if left unchecked
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