[zalambar]

I understand that tweets were sent because a user opted-in and use some setting to elect to share activity on the site. As a developer I know how tempting it is to defensively declare "that's not a bug" when you feel that no error exists in the implementation itself. However I also think that is a weak excuse and one which you should stop using because it reads as you trying to pass off responsibility for what happened.

Yes, the system did what the user told it to. That doesn't matter. @julien51 seems to have sent 208 "I'm enjoying..." tweets between 10:31 and 10:34, more than a tweet per second for three minutes. To the product's user, and anyone following them on Twitter that's a bug. They don't care (though you certainly should) if the root cause was poor UI design or unclear documentation, or a poorly written background job, or a bad data migration, or whatever else could have gone wrong. You really only have two options when communicating about your features to your users; either "its broken" or "its working as intended". If you're lucky you might have enough credit with them to be able to add "its working as intended for now but we have plans to improve it in the future".

I don't mean to be too harsh or attack bradfordcross or Prismatic specifically here. I've certainly been responsible for my share of bad user experiences through bugs or "not a bug"s. This just struck me as perhaps a poor way to represent a product to an audience that might trust it or be hearing about it for the first time.

I'm curious, if you had considered the root cause to be a bug what difference would that have made?