Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real problem was that so many people felt the urge to reply to that PR making it so much worse than a single ping. I can live with the random message that has nothing to do with me, but having to delete an endless stream of messages because so many people felt the need to reply already knowing that it would go out to everyone is really annoying
Happened in my wife’s company of around 40k people. Mail to all, replies to stop replying, many hours to stop the firestorm. Then next timezone 8 hours out started replying. I don’t know why they didn’t just kill permissions to the mailing list.
GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
291–300 of 468 posts
Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
#292So 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 soun…
GitHub has a public option for repositories which would have allowed anyone to see the source code, but instead EpicGames wanted to collect more private information on anyone that wanted to see the source code, and now they have a PR problem because of it.
Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real problem was that so many people felt the urge to reply to that PR making it so much worse than a single ping. I can live with the random message that has nothing to do with me, but having to delete an endless stream of messages because so many people felt the need to reply already knowing that it would go out to everyone is really annoying
Happened in my wife’s company of around 40k people. Mail to all, replies to stop replying, many hours to stop the firestorm. Then next timezone 8 hours out started replying. I don’t know why they didn’t just kill permissions to the mailing list.
Outlook has this amazing feature to ignore email threads: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ignore-all-email-...
Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
#294Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real problem was that so many people felt the urge to reply to that PR making it so much worse than a single ping. I can live with the random message that has nothing to do with me, but having to delete an endless stream of messages because so many people felt the need to reply already knowing that it would go out to everyone is really annoying
Happened in my wife’s company of around 40k people. Mail to all, replies to stop replying, many hours to stop the firestorm. Then next timezone 8 hours out started replying. I don’t know why they didn’t just kill permissions to the mailing list.
Similar thing happened at uni when I was doing a PhD.
The graduate office had some sort of mailing list which included all PhD students (or maybe even graduate students). There was maybe one mail a year to this list.
At some point someone replied to the list (don't ask why the allowed everyone to post), they want to be unsubscribe, trigger a torrent of emails of people wanting to unsubscribe, people telling people to use the link on the email, people asking why they get this email, others telling everyone to stop replying (the irony). It was a study of human psychology.
The whole thing lasted a week, I think in the end somebody was competent enough to restrict who could write to the list or maybe they just nuked the list.
Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
I had to turn off my paypal.me because I naively picked a number for a username and people kept putting that number in the send-to-username field and sent me free money, which they always tried to refund later, getting me stuck dealing with PayPal's customer service through no fault of mine. I would explain to them that I didn't ask for the money, I do not want to keep the money, and I am not accusing the sender of scamming. Sometimes I was able to refund instantly but depending on the sender and payment method, PayPal had to get involved for weeks of back and forth.
Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
#297Anyone could have done this by mistake, all it'd take is being a bit tired and @ing the wrong group. The question is - why doesn't the platform warn you that you're going to send notifications to a large number of people in the same way that many email clients do?
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.
People always take stuff too seriously…this is cute in a weird internet way. To loose your mind over such a thing is not good
Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems like an innocent enough mistake. I doubt it. If you look at the PR, it does not add any value at all, but introduces a mistake ("for our repositories"), plus the commit message is kind of strange.
Looks like a typical PR from young programmers who are learning English, which is consistent with the rest of the profile.
I don't quite get the mindset here. I'm (slowly and lazily) learning a new language, and can't imagine going into some native speaker's repo and trying to correct it...
Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I’m sure they’ll institute some kind of control to make this sort of thing harder, but honestly I’ve never understood why people get so worked up about this sort of thing. It makes me chuckle. The person looks like a dummy or a shit-stirrer and a lot of people have to delete HUNDREDS (oh my) of messages and have LITERAL MINUTES of their time wasted. The megacorp I work for wastes more of my time with silly self-…
> The ones with the scorched earth PUNISH HIM attitude need to chill the hell out. Doesn't that just add to the comedy?
Yeah. Also their real names and them being immature and getting angry also went out to 400k people and is now effectively part of history. That's probably even worse than being the kid who did this, what if a future employer comes across this?
Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
#300So 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 soun…
GitHub has a public option for repositories which would have allowed anyone to see the source code, but instead EpicGames wanted to collect more private information on anyone that wanted to see the source code, and now they have a PR problem because of it.
They wanted a signed ToS because it is only ‘source available’.
Maybe GitHub just was not the best way to make a large readonky non-open source codebase available