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GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

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Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#431

Post by bhargav »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #199

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 con…

> 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"?

At mentioning all admins and developers in general on a PR is bad etiquette. Look at the title of the PR here as well. "Merge ASAP"? What kind of attitude is that? Github should have some controls on notifications as should Epic games in how they manage their groups, but this highlights bad etiquette.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#432

Post by likortera »

saagarjha wrote: post #235
likortera wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your company likely has full access to that account and I would generally not recommend using any devices owned by your employer for side projects unless they specifically allow you to in some sort of legal contract that says something along the lines of them not owning everything you do on that account.

> Your company likely has full access

No, they don't. At my company we buy our own laptops, and we expense them. There is no VPN and no company owned software installed. And most of what we do is Open Source anyway.

> specifically allow you to in some sort of legal contract that says something along the lines of them not owning everything you do on that account

Not a problem, my side projects are just for learning purposes. They're open source, and most of them end up abandoned. I'm not running a side business on a company laptop, so they can own everything if they want, I'm fine with that.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#433

Post by iuri1 »

TeamMCS wrote: post #253

Man it's still ongoing, and now the trolls have discovered it. The original thread somehow managed to crash my iphone due to the sheer number of replies. Amazing GH even made this possible. Not sure if there's also a data leak, I notice my email was CCed, not BCCed. Now they've managed to email nearly half a million people, this could go on for ages as idiots keep responding to the original chains. Wonder if EpicGame…

You're probably still experiencing pull request #26 which was an actual trolling.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#434

Post by registeredcorn »

bhargav wrote: post #431
quadrifoliate wrote: post #199

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 con…

> 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"? At mentio…

>mentioning all admins and developers in general on a PR is bad etiquette.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but why even is this? If you're trying to perform a pull request, is it not logical to ping the people who approve those requests?

Also, can you give an example of how one would perform a PR and follow this unwritten etiquette? I have only made a total of something like to PRs in GitHub, but I would like to stay on peoples good sides, if I can help it. I had no idea this was seen as some kind of obscenity.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#435

Post by rvnx »

k8sToGo wrote: post #244
woojoo666 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why do people get so easily pissed off? Can't you just ignore the email?

You pay 0.10 USD per 1000 e-mails received on Amazon SES

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#436

Post by al_borland »

sureglymop wrote: post #290
al_borland wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free Code Camp had a bug in their email notification system several years back. I suspect they weren’t incrementing the index in their loop… Since I was the first person in the email list, I got an email for every person in their list. I had to shut my phone off, as the notifications were going out of control and couldn’t keep up. Fun fact, Gmail caps threads at 100 messages. So I had a full page of 100 email long th…

That's terrifying.. did the notifications make your phone unusable? DOSed by FreeCodeCamp...

Yeah, pretty much. I forcefully shut my phone off, as I was unable to just get to the settings, and then was trying to DM the guy via Twitter to try and get it to stop. Eventually it did stop and he reached out to tell me what went wrong.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#437

Post by iuri1 »

kappuchino wrote: post #342

Anecdotal: I participated in the reddit secret santa back in ... 2012?! and we all "won" a certificate from guinness records. Except ... that you still had to buy it as a physical copy. And so some poor marketing person from guinness sent this email to all the participants - no bcc, not even cc. And then the frist person replied. Another. And another. It was a party. So guinness issued an apology (and hopefully didn'…

Did they sent the bonus certificate for participating in the biggest e-mail spam list as well?

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#438

Post by blensor »

zenexer wrote: post #419
mumblemumble wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't even that many people. Maybe (and generously, I think) 100 commenters out of ~400,000 people who got notified? That's 0.025%.

All of those 400k people were notified because the author tagged a group containing 400k people. For every comment, 400k emails went out. I never commented, but I received an email for every comment in that issue. The email queue was so backed up that I was receiving emails for quite some time after the issue was closed.

And some troll did the same thing with another pull request about 2 hours ago.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#439

Post by iuri1 »

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.

They will probably get a special treatment from Github and Github's code will get an unnecessary `if` clause for the special cases (right now probably only the epic one).

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#440

Post by chupasaurus »

weberer wrote: post #412
chupasaurus wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can download it via Epic Game Store without joining the org. Github organization is for contribution from non-employees as well as source code for various projects (like engine demos).

Only for those still using Windows. The head of Epic has some bizarre complex against Linux, so they refuse to release binaries (or the Epic Game Store at all) for Linux. So the only way to install Unreal Engine is to link your Github account to their org, clone it, then build it from source. Which takes a few hours and something like 70gb of disk space while building. https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/Sharing…

Epic simply doesn't GAF about Linux, IIRC for 2 years the whole support for building UE4 on Linux was done by a single man who isn't an employee.
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