18-year-old GitHub “new” submitted PR, accidentally “bombed” nearly 400,000 developers…

Organize | Jung Ryeo Won

Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)

When you think of being 18, what comes to your mind? Some people will recall the days when they were concentrating on preparing for the college entrance examination, some people will imagine their ideal college life, and some people have begun to plan for their adult self – now the 18-year-old programmer “Mengxin” Rohith Sreedharan is like this (its tweet The special profile has the line “an 18-year-old”).

It may be for practice, or it may be to “polish” the resume. On Friday, Rohith Sreedharan submitted a “can but not necessary” PR to the GitHub repository of the world-renowned game company Epic Games (aiming to optimize the README file in the a few wording issues and logo size).

As everyone knows, the follow-up triggered by this PR can really add a “strong color” to his resume: it caused the email to “bomb” about 400,000 developers, and this incident was also included in Wikipedia .

Submit a PR to notify nearly 400,000 developers

To put it simply, the cause of this incident is that Rohith Sreedharan submitted a PR with no technical content to Epic Games – there is no problem with submitting a PR, and there is no problem with a PR without any technical content, but the problem is that Rohith Sreedharan submitted this PR after submitting this PR. , in order to make your PR merged as soon as possible, @EpicGames/developers in the comments .

Perhaps in Rohith Sreedharan’s view, an account only corresponds to one person or one organization, and its messages will only remind the account holder of his @. But unexpectedly, according to the Unreal Engine GitHub source code access regulations, anyone who wants to access the project source code must first join the Epic Games organization .

In other words, this “@EpicGames/developers” involved not just one person or a group of a few people, but all the members of the Epic Games organization, which at the time numbered as high as 398,463 .

The result can be imagined: the PR submitted by Rohith Sreedharan was notified to nearly 400,000 developers by email .

PR itself has many problems

What’s more outrageous is that as long as any of these 400,000 developers leave a comment on Rohith Sreedharan’s PR, their comments will also be notified by email to all members of the Epic Games organization, that is, they will be collectively caught in the email “bombing” .

In this case, it would be better if the PR submitted by Rohith Sreedharan had no problems. However, many developers who received the notification found a lot of problems after viewing the PR, which led to a large number of comments and corresponding email notifications. .

  • “It’s correcting typos with more typos.”
  • “Your patch is causing as many problems as it should fix, and even your PR doesn’t describe what it’s solving.”

Soon, a developer pointed out a way to manually unsubscribe from this PR: “There’s an ‘unsubscribe’ button in the right column, almost at the bottom, right above the participant list. Click it and ignore the flood of incoming notifications. “After that, Epic Games also locked the PR as soon as possible after knowing it, and closed its comment function.

However, due to the impact of GitHub’s email notification service, there is a delay in email sending, that is, developers may still receive emails that have not been sent in a timely manner.

Apology on Twitter: “I didn’t know it was going to 400,000 members”

Rohith Sreedharan felt guilty about the consequences of inadvertently “bombing” nearly 400,000 developers with emails, and he specifically tweeted an apology:

“I’m so sorry I didn’t know there would be 400,000 members flagged, really sorry for the spam , apologies to all the team including @EpicGames and @github, didn’t expect this to happen, thank you guys Notify me! I promise this won’t happen again.”

Not only that, but for Rohith Sreedharan, who is only 18 years old, this incident is obviously unbearable and fearful: “I’m worried that my GitHub account will be banned”, “Will the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) investigate?”, “I I’m really starting to feel like I’m dying…”

Facing the apology and worry of the 18-year-old, most developers left messages to express their understanding and comfort, and suggested that GitHub should optimize the mechanism to prevent such incidents from happening again :

  • “It’s not your fault, because the system didn’t stop you from doing this: 1) the system should be very clear about who will be notified by you before sending a message; 2) it shouldn’t have access to all repos at our permission level Participants are notified.”
  • “Blame the problem on the GitHub system. If it wasn’t you, someone else could trigger the same problem, which could have other bad effects. That is, you point it out and salvage the next problem before it happens. It’s nothing to worry about.”

Shay Frendt, senior director of engineering at GitHub, responded to these suggestions in a comment: “We’re sorry that our current system design has caused you to get into this situation. We’re working hard to release a patch to try and break the feedback loop you’re all stuck in .”

Another developer easily joked: “Now you can put this on your resume: Turn GitHub into a botnet of spam emails by submitting a PR to Epic Games’ GitHub repository.”

The most interesting thing is that someone left a message pointing out that this incident was also added as an example to the Wikipedia entry for “Email storm (e-mail storm)” :

In this regard, 18-year-old Rohith Sreedharan was shocked again: “On Wikipedia!!”

So, what do you think about this event, please leave a message to share!

The text and pictures in this article are from CSDN

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This article is reprinted from https://www.techug.com/post/at-the-age-of-18-github-mengxin-submitted-pr-and-accidentally-bombed-nearly-400000-developers/
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