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GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

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Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#441

Post by whoibrar »

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.

> A human printing emails and placing them on your desk could handle that workload.

Best thing I've read today only after the email story.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#442

Post by Blackthorn »

smcleod wrote: post #18

Anyone 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?

> 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?

The real question is why is it allowed to send at all? Depending on human judgment to stop spamming is a poor decision because bad actors don't care. I discovered this and GitHub s hilariously terrible setup a week ago when another large repository became a spam source and GitHub offered no easy way to unsubscribe.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#443

Post by cyberlurker »

jen20 wrote: post #408
cyberlurker wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God bless you :) But yes, we’ve seen from a number of US politicians how bad of an idea it is to mix personal and work on one device/account. Usually email. It is annoying having two phones if work isn’t paying.

If work isn’t paying, what gives them the right to have email or chat in your personal phone?!

There is no right, just a personal choice. If you have to lug around the company provided laptop if you want to check your work calendar/email/slack/whatever, you may start to consider using your personal device.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#444

Post by School-Cotton »

UncleEntity wrote: post #428
School-Cotton wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If it were up to me, I would have fired them immediately. Nobody has the right to conscript other people into their personal sense of humor. I’d just fire everyone with a sense of humor, that’ll show them. I’ve heard some people spend whole minutes setting up a joke for the punchline. How many billions of dollars does that cost the economy each year one has to wonder. Outright theft of wages if you ask me!

Intentionally annoying other people isn’t comparable to telling jokes.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#445

Post by bhargav »

registeredcorn wrote: post #434
bhargav wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I assume you work in tech. Let's say you work at Netflix, are you pinging anyone and everyone to review each PR you make or are you assigning a few reviewers (or better yet, does it just auto assign owners based on CODEOWNERS)? Are you titling your PRs this way? How do you describe the changes?

Now imagine, everyone at Netflix made PRs the same way this author did. How do we make sure there is not a lot of noise? How do we collaborate well together?

I don't think you are being argumentative. I definitely think Epic games is at fault here, and that this points to issues in how they've setup teams and lack of guard rails on Github's part in terms of spam protection. But separate to this, the author's behaviour is not what I would want at a workplace I am at.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#446

Post by [deleted] »

Gigachad wrote: post #198
throwaway892238 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#447

Post by geerlingguy »

sverhagen wrote: post #179
cmckn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a thundering herd e-mail at Amazon about 10 years ago that I’ve heard stories about. It went on for days. There’s a funny internal talk with lots of data about it, maybe it’s on YouTube by now…

Looking around, everyone has a story like this, so I don't want to just pile on with my similar experience at Verizon. But what stood out at me there was the low quality responses from low-level managers in far parts of the world, demanding, by the power vested in them, to be taken off the email chain... you know... IMMEDIATELY!

This happened at all my previous employers at one point or another. Most famously a thread about unsubscribing from a mailing list that nobody really knew about but had everyone in the company on it. For weeks there'd be some random field sales guy or a marketing person in random parts of the world replying all.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#448

Post by saagarjha »

likortera wrote: post #432
saagarjha wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pu…

I’m glad it works out for you, but perhaps you see the issue with offering your advice unqualified in this situation?

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#449

Post by dheera »

jen20 wrote: post #408
cyberlurker wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God bless you :) But yes, we’ve seen from a number of US politicians how bad of an idea it is to mix personal and work on one device/account. Usually email. It is annoying having two phones if work isn’t paying.

If work isn’t paying, what gives them the right to have email or chat in your personal phone?!

Many people are effectively sheep and will install a company app on their personal phone because "wow it's so convenient everything is all on one device".

That said ... employment is at-will, so there are no real rules here. It's not that different from if you sign up to be an Uber driver you're expected to have a car and a phone that you are willing to use for work, or you can't take the job. Nobody says it has to be the same device as the one you use for your personal email, it's just that you are expected to have a device for the job. So nothing legally prevents them from requiring you to have a device with the company apps on it, in return for you accepting some hopefully big enough salary.

For software engineering, if the salary is on the low end of market I expect work to buy me a work phone, if they require me to install any apps. If salary is on the high end, then I wouldn't fuss about it too much, I could just buy myself a separate personal phone for work with the pile of extra cash, but them buying me one would still be a nice, appreciated gesture.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#450

Post by Ansil849 »

chii wrote: post #143
Ansil849 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sending email notifications to 400,000 users for unimportant things is antisocial. What about requiring people to join a specific team to access the source for no apparent reason? In other words, how are the conditions which led to the creation of this inflated team not antisocial as well?

> a specific team to access the source for no apparent reason? it isn't for no apparent reason - it's to accept the terms of the agreement for access to the unreal source code.

> it's to accept the terms of the agreement for access to the unreal source code.

Alright. So if Epic Games are abusing Github Teams, why should the poster not be able to also?

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