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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I find the founder's apologies in the issue thread [0] believable. Not as in "they were right", but more "they thought this was useful, realized they were completely off base, and it will not happen again".

[0]: https://github.com/OpenBB-finance/OpenBBTerminal/issues/1625

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I'll be honest, I was angry enough about the email that I unsubscribed and blocked their emails. It’s a one and done situation for me. I personally have zero interest in any project that thinks it’s a good idea to scrape the emails of people that star their repo, subscribe them to a MailChimp mailing list, and send them marketing emails, as if this is Product Hunt (who also wouldn’t allow this without opt-in) and not a code sharing platform.

It’s great they apologized, but for me, it was a one strike, you’re out scenario. And it underscores what I see as a significant misunderstanding of why something should be open source. It shouldn’t be seen as a marketing funnel. And if the only reason something is offered as OSS is as a marketing funnel, gather your data somewhere other than GitHub.

Disclosure: I work at GitHub but had only just joined as an employee when this happened. Had I been there longer than like two days, I would have probably flagged the account and let the abuse team make a decision on it.

Nowadays we are accustomed of this kind of campaigns from everywhere. From the pure marketing perspective it is common.

Absolutely understandable. I simply wanted to highlight their response as it, imo, was not the normal "oopsie" one.

> FWIW, I find the founder's apologies in the issue thread [0] believable.

The comment thread here looks fishy enough that I am disinclined to give the benefit of doubt here.

they probably had a warning of mailchimp that putting someone on a mailing list without their consent is a forbidden use of mailchimp.

source: I worked with an organization which put a lot of people in their mailchimp mailing list

We did.

But that was after I received a SPAM email saying "Welcome to our newsletter" in my personal GitHub account when I wasn't part of that audience.

You can see my interaction with someone from our team here: https://github.com/OpenBB-finance/OpenBBTerminal/issues/1625... - When we realize what had just happened.

We immediately deleted that audience (which was our plan all along anyway), but then it was too late, we were trending on HackerNews and Mailchimp pinged us after. After that it was mostly damage control, as there's nothing we could have done to make things better.

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