GitHub user sends notification to 400k users • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#191

Post by likortera » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 5:05 AM UTC

macintux wrote: post #92

faustomorales wrote: post #82

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)…

Ouch. I try to not mix work and personal content on the same laptop, I’ve seen too many glitches (although usually not quite that embarrassing). Slack has been my one exception (although only on my phone). Thanks for the valuable reminder.

My solution to this is to have two separate accounts on my work laptop.

One for work, the other one for side projects, personal browser, courses, learning, etc.

As long as you're not doing anything illegal and are running on a non Administrator account, I think it is a good compromise vs having to carry a second laptop.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#192

Post by Gigachad » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 5:05 AM UTC

a-dub wrote: post #170

i don't understand all the drama. i have one whole extra thread in my inbox and it's actually rather entertaining to read. there are lots of real travesties in this world, this is not one of them.

Some people have their email set to live ping which would make it much more annoying. I imagine it also cost a small fortune for Github to send this many emails.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#193

Post by spike021 » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 5:06 AM UTC

imadethis wrote: post #134

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.

That was sometime in 2015-2016. People still post recipes in big reply-all chains or when cisco-flame gets too heated.

Dang that really takes me back.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#194

Post by Gigachad » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 5:07 AM UTC

ansible wrote: post #148

srinathkrishna wrote: post #83

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!

> ... his intentions were probably good ... Are we looking at the same pull request? https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pull/24/commits/4e531d5c... That's ... a super crap PR, hovering near trollish behavior territory.

It's apparently a young person who submitted it. I think most of us who were that age with github available submitted some crap PRs. I remember I submitted some low quality PRs that just changed comment formatting/typos on some large repos. Not trolling, just trying to contribute in some way and get my name in the project without having enough skills for a real PR.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#195

Post by wiseowise » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 5:08 AM UTC

thrownawayalre wrote: post #124

Innocent mistake. The kid is barely 18. The emotion and stress resulting from mistakenly sending a notification to 400,000 is likely overwhelming. Now his real name is going to stay at the center of the internet for a while thanks to being 1st on HN. I would definitely not have coped well with that much internet attention at his age. Some Github replies are more immature than the initial action and I hope he does not…

> The emotion and stress resulting from mistakenly sending a notification to 400,000 is likely overwhelming.

Bold of you to assume that he can even comprehend this.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#196

Post by Gigachad » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 5:08 AM UTC

innocenat wrote: post #93

gabeio wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does but each comment adds 400k emails to the queue before you, so all of the comments that happened before you unsubscribed are already queued. I unsubscribed and it did eventually stop.

I was sleeping and the constant new mails notification woke me. By then it was too late to unsubscribe as the topics was already locked, but I was only on like 60-70th mails.

You should really change your settings so random emails don't ring out at night.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#197

Post by bottled_poe » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 5:09 AM UTC

rcfox wrote: post #162

pigbearpig wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, the PR is some pointless wordsmithing and then to comment "Verify the pull request and merge asap" is a bit ridiculous. Also, no one is going to care in a day.

> Also, no one is going to care in a day. You should ask Sumit Bhatia about that. ;)

Is there a word for a statement which inadvertently supports the opposing position in a debate?

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#198

Post by Gigachad » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 5:10 AM UTC

throwaway892238 wrote: post #146

rgoulter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accid…

Creating a team with 400,000 users is antisocial. GitHub teams, and all their inter-related features, are built around a small group of people collaborating together on code. GitHub teams are not intended solely to grant access to source code after signing a EULA. Making a team with 400K users is just a bad idea and this problem was waiting to happen. Unreal needs to find a different solution for what they want.

What other solution? What tools does Github provide to give access to a private repo without creating a namespace which can be pinged? It seems like exactly the use teams were created for just on a scale not seen before. The answer would be Github adding a feature to mark a team as semi public and remove the ability to tag it.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#199

Post by quadrifoliate » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 5:11 AM UTC

The only notable thing here IMO is the lack of limits imposed by GitHub on notifications. Apparently a random tag of `@microsoft` in the comments was enough to notify 4000 people [1] as well.

I have no idea why the user is even being mentioned in this headline. I haven't used GitHub in a while, and am unfamiliar with orgs and subgroups, but tagging a developer subgroup on a PR seems...a reasonable thing for a new contributor to do? How is it their fault that the developer subgroup has been hijacked by this organization to mean "Anyone who has ever signed the Terms of Service To View Our Code"?

The correct thing for Epic Games to do here would be to rename the group to `@EpicGames/terms-of-service-signatories`, and restrict `@EpicGames/developers` to people who have requested access to open a PR. Assuming that people should magically know not to mention `@EpicGames/developers` in their PRs because Epic is doing some ToS shenanigans is preposterous.

I guess I'll be looking carefully at mentions the next time I have to use this social network [2] masquerading poorly as a code review tool to submit a pull request.

----------------------------------------

[1] https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pull/24#issuecomment-114...

[2] Looking at the profile of the contributor making the PR tells me that GitHub has apparently decided to let their users independently rediscover the experience of SuperWall on Facebook circa 2007.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#200

Post by avl999 » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 5:12 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #192

a-dub wrote: post #170

i don't understand all the drama. i have one whole extra thread in my inbox and it's actually rather entertaining to read. there are lots of real travesties in this world, this is not one of them.

Some people have their email set to live ping which would make it much more annoying. I imagine it also cost a small fortune for Github to send this many emails.

> Some people have their email set to live ping which would make it much more annoying.

That sounds like a "those people" problem. We don't hold people who use door knobs to account for the sake of a small number of people who like to lick door knobs and then get sick.

> I imagine it also cost a small fortune for Github to send this many emails.

That sounds like a problem for Github for not implementing any kind of checks and balances on their perfectly open feature if for some reason sending emails is expensive for them.