Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 468 posts

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#411

Post by saagarjha »

rwiggins wrote: post #260
saagarjha wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS has user enrollment which is broadly equivalent: https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/user-enrollment-a... . Google does not adopt this (but it could, b/234963918).

Oh, thanks for the link. Looks like I'm out of date. Seems to be a relatively newish feature (~2020), but on the surface that does seem ideal. I haven't dug into the specifics, so I'm not sure if there's a gap preventing its use or if it's just a matter of priorities.

I don't have any real insight into this but my guess would be that enterprise stuff moves slowly and often has complaints about the new solution not having all the management features they used to use.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#412

Post by weberer »

chupasaurus wrote: post #127
syrrim wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To download unreal engine, you need to join this org.

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/SharingAndReleasing...

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#413

Post by activitypea »

landr0id wrote: post #115
Ansil849 wrote: post #109

I'm confused. Can someone explain why the Epic Games developers team has close to 400k members?

They require you to acknowledge some terms that grant you access to the Unreal Engine source code. They grant it by adding you to their GitHub org which has the engine source code as a private repo.

I accepted those terms, and was added to Unreal's repo, but didn't get a notification. I think the mentioned group is some subset of the repo users, but 400k is such a big number that I'm not sure who they could be.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#414

Post by elif »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #278
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…

People who blame that kid are ridiculous. People who are asking to punish him somehow are pathetic. There should be no way to send any non-premoderated information to 400k people (from the system that has some trust and is unlikely to be filtered) - “spam” is the most innocent thing that might happen. It's just a fly you should ignore. Political, religious, and radical extremist groups could use it for a much more da…

agree, whatever that kid did, it is not as bad as the first commenter there spamming everyone knowingly. which is not as bad as the second commenter who is even less original yet still seeking attention, ad infinitum. the last commenter is the biggest jerk IMO.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#415

Post by mumblemumble »

blensor wrote: post #217
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)…

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

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%.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#416

Post by [deleted] »

sph wrote: post #359
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.

Your email client is crashing because it can't handle a hundred messages in an hour, that's a little less than 2 messages per minute? Throw that thing in the bin. A human printing emails and placing them on your desk could handle that workload.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#417

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

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.

I was 'removed from an internet platform' when I was a kid inadvertently breaking the rules by posting off-topic threads in the wrong Sci-Fi community subforum. So apparently we do just do it.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#418

Post by emeraldd »

We use slack internally where I work. There is a somewhat unwritten rule that you should not use @here or equivalent as a general user. There are a few cases where it's ok to if you really have something for everyone in the channel ( Aka don't run this it's broken type stuff ...) so some channels leave @here enabled. Still, I go From mildly amused to feeling sorry for the unsuspecting newbie who didn't look at the size of the channel and think: Do 4k people really need to hear about my problem?

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#419

Post by zenexer »

mumblemumble wrote: post #415
blensor wrote: post #217

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

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.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#420

Post by zenexer »

School-Cotton wrote: post #316
blensor wrote: post #217

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

The worst is that it becomes clear eventually that people are responding just to troll. The casual vandalism of hundreds of thousands of people’s time and attention is absolutely mind-boggling to me. I saw similar things at large (50k+ employees) companies when some reply-all chain got started — people who clearly knew better, replying just for the lulz. If it were up to me, I would have fired them immediately. Nobod…

People want GitHub to fix their system. Epic also has annoying process whereby you have to join their GitHub organization to access certain free tools, which is why they have a GitHub group with 400k people in the first place.

Edit: What great timing—someone just opened a new issue with the same tag. This needs to be fixed on GitHub’s end.

Post reply on HN