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GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

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Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#261

Post by nicky0 »

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.

The real question is why on earth do you have notifications enabled for all emails?

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#262

Post by Aeolun »

Ansil849 wrote: post #102
macintux wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I try to not mix work and personal content on the same laptop It's kind of jaw dropping to me at how this is still not the norm and how people gratuitously mix personal and work content on the same devices, both mobile and desktop.

Carrying two machines around all the time is no fun.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#263

Post by tannhaeuser »

Ansil849 wrote: post #102
macintux wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I try to not mix work and personal content on the same laptop It's kind of jaw dropping to me at how this is still not the norm and how people gratuitously mix personal and work content on the same devices, both mobile and desktop.

Umm, I remember a time when Personal Computers were seen as universal, do-it-all devices. And there was this expectation, you know, that your FOSS-OS will put all your security and privacy choices into your hand. That was roughly before folks took the red pill and went all-in on intransparent browser apps and would program their change-the-world app for themselves, to be released when ready. Unlike today where they flaunt non-novel, insignificant, uninspired crap on github.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#264

Post by shp0ngle »

spinaltap wrote: post #250
jffry wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unreal engine is source-available with a royalty based license for commercial use. Just to avoid any confusion with "open source" and "Open Source"

Wait what? I never knew "open source" was different from "Open Source"

“open source” (capitalized or not) means that Open Source initiative agrees with the license. There are some conditions that I don’t remember.

It’s different from “source available” - open source should let you fork and reuse it.

For example there is microsoft shared code license, that’s “here is the code, but copyright is still ours, you can’t do anything with it but look”.

I have no idea what kind of license (if any) is unreal engine.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#265

Post by EugeneOZ »

wonderbore wrote: post #116
nimbius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

friendly reminder: 400k is an apertif for a competently configured production postfix server. its about 14 seconds of mail, and about 8 seconds optimized at hw and filesystem level. the real issue here is shitty projects from shitty companies.

Yes but that’s on top of what GitHub is already sending, plus it must be multiplied by the number of comments left on top of that. It feels like 35 straight minutes of 100% usage isn’t great on any system. It presumably sent 61 million emails.

GitHub can afford more than one computer to send their emails.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#266

Post by dmix »

inb4_cancelled wrote: post #181
rcfox wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What did the guy do?

> An email requesting system access went out to all employees . It triggered a reply to all frenzy that resulted in my blackberry pinging constantly for over an hour with people replying-to-all asking to be removed from the distribution list. Even Mike Lazaridis replied to all asking this to be stopped. Then as different parts of the globe started work, they would reply to all. Classic evening. I think system admins eventually shut down the frenzy at server level. Some of the replies were hilarious though. I think I still have some screenshots somewhere.

https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/qstmls/sumit_bha...

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#267

Post by tobyhinloopen »

Animats wrote: post #239
cmeacham98 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access to the UE4 source code is free. They probably sell licenses that let you do more than the free license, but the Github thing is not used to gate purchases. I don't know why they do it like this to be honest, they could just put the free license in the repo, that's pretty common practice.

Because it's not a free license. Once you get a million dollars or so in revenue, they take a substantial cut. The idea is that nobody is going to get a million dollars in revenue from a game without being visible enough that Epic's receivables department can bill you. So they can ignore the 99.99% who download it and never get a hit. I'm amazed that 400,000 people have downloaded Unreal Engine, though. It's really c…

Many mod makers will use unreal engine as well.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#268

Post by edwcross »

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 patch itself is indeed worse than useless, it's the kind of rephrasing just to say "I did something", but which actually makes it worse (adds useless words and English mistakes). If the "kid" is ready to send this kind of useless "contribution" (which takes some deliberate effort), they surely are ready for being reprimanded (or, more likely, they will be actually proud of it).

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#269

Post by planb »

So apparently https://github.com/orgs/EpicGames/teams/developers is a private group where anyone who wants to see the Unreal Engine source code has to join. Do you have to be a member of a group to send out notifications for mentions? If so, this guy did nothing wrong (besides the useless PR and his "fix this asap" attitude) - it's Epic misusing a GitHub feature. Sending notifications for mentions of _your_ team sounds like the reasonable default.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#270

Post by tobyhinloopen »

fellellor wrote: post #247

The worst part was that even unsubscribe to the thread does nothing and I kept on getting emails. However, this was fixed for me by creating a new email address and pointing all epic organisation emails to that one. … I wonder why unsubscribe didn’t work.

Maybe the emails were already scheduled
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