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Comment by dandongus | Hacker News Reader

can someone explain how this isn't the intended behavior?

It may be intended behavior, but for a trivial change like this to easily, without warning, mass ping ~400k users that is not desirable behavior. The submitter thought he was pinging developers of the project, but instead pinged mostly people who do not handle accepting upstream changes. Discord for examples handles mass pings by showing you a warning dialog saying you are about to ping X many people and if you are sure you want to do that.

Sending email notifications to 400,000 users for unimportant things is antisocial. (If 0.1% of those users then reply on the thread, it'd be another 400 comments sent to all 400,000 recipients).

I don't think anyone sits down and thinks the intentional behaviour should be "we should make it easy for someone to send a notification email to 400,000 people". That would clearly be annoying.

I think the behaviour is accidental, arising from "notifying all people in a team is useful".

> Sending email notifications to 400,000 users for unimportant things is antisocial.

What about requiring people to join a specific team to access the source for no apparent reason? In other words, how are the conditions which led to the creation of this inflated team not antisocial as well?

> a specific team to access the source for no apparent reason?

it isn't for no apparent reason - it's to accept the terms of the agreement for access to the unreal source code.

> it's to accept the terms of the agreement for access to the unreal source code.

Alright. So if Epic Games are abusing Github Teams, why should the poster not be able to also?

Creating a team with 400,000 users is antisocial. GitHub teams, and all their inter-related features, are built around a small group of people collaborating together on code. GitHub teams are not intended solely to grant access to source code after signing a EULA. Making a team with 400K users is just a bad idea and this problem was waiting to happen. Unreal needs to find a different solution for what they want.

What other solution? What tools does Github provide to give access to a private repo without creating a namespace which can be pinged? It seems like exactly the use teams were created for just on a scale not seen before. The answer would be Github adding a feature to mark a team as semi public and remove the ability to tag it.

They will probably get a special treatment from Github and Github's code will get an unnecessary `if` clause for the special cases (right now probably only the epic one).

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