Oh and one has even posted a "goatse" image there ...
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.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/me...
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/re...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/nhs-e...
And then the news broke out and that drove even more than 1% to check out the drama. Maybe even had some people sign up for Epic just to check it 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.
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. Nobody has the right to conscript other people into their personal sense of humor.
It's annoying to get useless email, but 95% of the non-spam email I receive everyday is useless crap: T&C changes, some company newsletter that somehow I never unsubscribed to, other notifications deemed so important I cannot unsubscribe to, a GitHub thread I subscribed to years ago and now has a very active discussion.
It's not like every single person received 400k emails in one go, it's 400k people receiving those 10 or 20 messages from the same thread over an hour. Annoying, waste of time, but not unheard of.
I’d also fire someone who “trolled” the company by spraying graffiti on the side of the building. Trivial to remove or even ignore, yes, but the unprofessional and juvenile mindset, taking pleasure in annoying everyone else, is enraging all by itself even if no practical harm was done.
This is random people on the Internet that probably didn't even know they were part of that notification group, as explained elsewhere in this thread, and then joked around a little longer than they should have. It might not been immediately clear to some that each of their responses was to be sent to all 400k.
Not at all the same crime as you paint it to be. In any case, there is no one that's fireable here, so no need to try looking for some kind of righteous justice here.
>the unprofessional and juvenile mindset, taking pleasure in annoying everyone else, is enraging all by itself even if no practical harm was done.
Working at your company sounds hellish.
Edit: What great timing—someone just opened a new issue with the same tag. This needs to be fixed on GitHub’s end.
That sounds a bit harsh. As a user of FOSS mailing lists I don't even think it is strange to send a mail to everyone.
It is a process issue where mailing lists are used for one way coms but still are writable for all.
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!
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