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Comment by voiper1 | Hacker News Reader

In the pop-out compose, it _replaced_ the send&archive. In the regular compose/reply/forward, it added another button to the side. I'm thinking the "bug" is that in the pop-out, it replaced the send&archive, so people _inadvertently_ clicked it out of muscle memory.

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Nah, the bug is that it actually triggered on the normal send button as well, for some people.

https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715770400555315202

The actual bug was apparently a little more nuanced than 'for some people'. If you tried the mic drop button in an empty email, it would fail to send. If you then used that same email draft and sent it regularly, the effect would still apply.

https://twitter.com/cabel/status/715769273545785344

The tweet i linked contains those details. ;)

That's a pretty bad bug! I imagine a pretty standard behavior would be open a compose window, notice the new button and click it out of curiosity (safely, since you have a blank email), and then go ahead with your normal email.

That is brutal.

I guess this kind of thing is why we no longer have flight simulators in our spreadsheets and so forth.

It's hard to screw things up too badly with something like the flight simulator. It's just a hidden toy completely disconnected from the rest of the program.

But when you start messing with the user's content as a joke, god help you.

> It's just a hidden toy completely disconnected from the rest of the program.

Hopefully!

For fun, on our site one of the developers made it so that if you entered the Konami code, every image would be replaced by random cat pictures. This was immediately ripped out of prod a few weeks later when a client asked why there were a bunch of cat photos in their dashboard. Still no idea how they triggered it.

We all felt very stupid and unprofessional.

I once did this on an internal app, we had a hotkeys library installed, so I added the GTA cheats to raise and lower your wanted level. It just added a temporary notice in the top right of your screen, nothing major. Turns out that if you mashed the keyboard, the library didn't properly handle 6+ character combinations, and would fire the callback anyways.

The send & archive button is optional and doesn't show up in everyone's gmail interface.

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