[umanwizard]

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. Nobody has the right to conscript other people into their personal sense of humor.

[sph]

I wouldn't go that far.

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.

[umanwizard]

The attitude annoys me more than the actual effect.

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.

[sph]

This is not an Epic employee that trolled the company.

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.

[mxkopy]

I don't think it's trolling, it's just having a lighthearted moment in an unexpected situation. You can't blame individuals for doing what they're supposed to do, i.e. replying to emails; at that point it's the moderators' jobs to kill mailing permissions or something.

>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.

[fnordpiglet]

You’ve obviously never removed graffiti.

[zenexer]

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.

[rightbyte]

> If it were up to me, I would have fired them immediately.

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.

[UncleEntity]

> 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!

[umanwizard]

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