@reset here. Always reply when I get @‘d because I love the laugh and also genuinely find the joy in looking at what people are building afterwards. Never stop, it’s a great part of my day
Your reply to the linked PR is great! One could either be really annoyed or really entertained by this, I’m glad you’ve got a sense of humour about it.
There use to be a site called batcave.net that gave free space and a subdomain. I had the name search.. search.batcave.net until one day when they decided to take back the search subdomain name and use it for themselves. From that point I've avoid great common usernames that one day might be too great
It's the exact reason that GitHub moved to github.io for GitHub Pages hosting. At first there were a few individual users still grandfathered in to be allowed to use <username>.github.com for their GitHub Pages, but I don't remember who they were and I don't know if that still works for them this many years later.
The real reason is avoiding user-generated content from stealing authentication cookies. If worldmaker.github.com can run a little bit of javascript to add @worldmaker as admin to all the user's repositories on github.com, well, that's a problem.
Both reasons are true. Also, relatedly, "stealing perceived authenticity": if a user sets up "help.github.com" or "about.github.com" or "wwww.github.com" and then runs a scam from it, it looks like GitHub is running the scam.
We had a similar problem when I worked at Belgacom Skynet from 1998 to 2001. We didn't separate our customer user aliases from our employee user aliases -- customer and employees alike were all "user@skynet.be".
The customer who had previously owned "brad@skynet.be" was real pissed when I got hired and his alias went away. And I don't blame him. But there wasn't anything I could do about it.
This mixing of employee and customer addresses on the same server really bit the company hard one day when a certain VP of the company felt that he had to mail out a 50MB PowerPoint presentation to every single employee in the company -- all 500+ of us under the alias all@skynet.be.
And no, at that time, the mail server did not have 25GB of disk space for the mail queue. He broke all mail across the company and all customers, until I went in and fixed his mess. Allowed mail message sizes went down to 5MB, and all mailing list type aliases went away and were replaced with a separate mailing list server. That VP was super pissed that he couldn't send out 50MB PowerPoint presentations any more, but I didn't suffer any repercussions due to what I did to fix the mess he had created.
Soon thereafter we bought new servers to use for customer-only traffic (matched pair of Sun 420Rs with a dishwasher-size external RAID array that they were connected to over fiberchannel), and we kept the old mail server (Sun E250 with eight internal hard drives with software RAID) for employee purposes.
I am unsure how society is "made worse"
On the contrary, this is playful, it is not evil or abusive. also helps keep companies on their toes. Changing someone's username without notifying them AND consent should be frowned on. Taking a large company to small claims will not make the company worse or hurt anyone. Most of the time it is helpful and sometimes brings about the creation of needed regulations. It is feedback in a professional manner for disrespecting one of their users/clients.
I agree with providing feedback to companies, and sometimes the court is the correct avenue. You raise a good point about how that can help to further everyone's interests. I just think that there is often a solution that's less painful for both sides before going to court.
I suppose if you're dealing with a large company that has lawyers on staff but doesn't care about user support, then this is a good avenue. Small companies and non-VC backed startups on the other hand wouldn't see it as playful.
So, contextually, I can see a situation where your perspective makes sense. Like those situations where you can imagine a corporate lawyer laughing at you for taking them to small claims over a username. You just need to read the room and know when it'd be good fun vs when it would cause problems.
Oh, and you also need to have enough money for expensive hobbies. The subset of users who are in a position to engage with companies this way probably differs significantly in many ways from the total population of users, assuming a popular product.
True, which is why it should be a considered a fun activity. Not everything is a hobby but a tool to exercised when needed or wanted.
I mentioned in a different comment how Github's policy and terms of service has no mention of changing an account's username with or without notice. Unless they can prove that they are "squatting" by holding an username considered "inactively held for future use." It is inappropriate behavior for Github to do this to OP.
I also mentioned to talk to support first but I failed to mention why. Instead my comment made it seem as though OP should immediately sue them. I do not condone that kind of behavior and would have edited my earlier comment to reflect this after some of the comments made it clear I made a mistake.(I can not edit it now)
Thank you for bringing this to my attention and grateful for your understanding. Hopefully I can leave this comment behind me as it seems to have run its course.
Civil courts are a service. They have significant delays and backlogs in many places, to the detriment of people with legitimate reasons to use them. Probably in no small part due to frivolous and nuisance suits.
You are not damaged by losing a username. You will lose no money, no status, no clients, nothing. If you choose to print your username on the side of your car that's your choice and GitHub isn't responsible for that. Your case would be dismissed immediately, in some states with prejudice, and rightfully so.
> It is feedback in a professional manner for disrespecting one of their users/clients.
NO, this is emphatically not what the court system is for. You don't sue someone (or a company) to "provide feedback." Courts exist for when you are damaged, you need to be made whole, and the parties cannot come to an agreement without a neutral third party.
It really depends on how we treat digital properties, for example, a username on github will link to your identity and work, the same way a domain name might.
If a domain name was taken, it would have major consequences, trotting out “we never told you to spend millions on super bowl ads” would be a weird take.
Obviously it is based on the contract, but it is not far off.
I don't think a username on someone else's service is comparable to a domain name. You buy a domain name. People go directly to your domain name. I would bet 90% or more of navigations to a github profile are linked from some other source (e.g. easy and borderline immediate to change) as opposed to typed into the url bar directly.
To be clear I think it's shitty for GH to change someone's username, especially without a lot of communication first, but I don't think it rises to the level of having any sort of damages you could try to litigate even in the worst cases.
If push comes to shove I would play ball and enjoy it, even if undesirable. I would like to say that I suggested OP should speak with Github support before court however people skipped that part because my comment mainly talked about the sueing aspect in deeper detail.
OP should talk to support and get Github communicate with the public more clearly through their policy/terms of service about forcing username changes with or without consent.
What is the claim? In the UK at least SCC requires that your claiming for some kind of (small) financial harm. What's that here?
Even if that's not the case in the USA (small civil claims against un-pursued crime?) it's still not clear to me what the issue is, or what 'right' they've violated. The judicial system isn't there for 'how displeased you are'.
Maybe I have my github account printed on business cards or even plastered on my car as advertising for my consulting practice. Or its embedded on marketing pages for consulting support for my open source project that now I need to pay a dev or dedicate time to update.
Or any other scenario where o have customers and potential customers that discover or interact with me at least partly through my github account.
This is the main issue I wanted to bring the conversation towards. instead I got flamed for making it seem like I am a "sue-aholic." Some people use their Github for business use and allowing Github to change a username without notice is bad blood. On top of that Github has no mention of telling its user base of changing usernames with or without notice. There is almost no mention that they can do whatever they like on their platform with your personal account details. If Github ever does end up changing someone's username and that person was doing what you said. Github would be in deeper trouble than what OP does have.
Obviously OP understands the company's decision for changing his username but he was allowed to have it in the beginning. It is odd to backtrack and force a name change without notice. Github should update their policy with new reasonings for allowing themselves the ability to change your username(or account details) without notice. Afterall If Github can change my username(or account details), I would like that to be communicated to me.
> requires that your claiming for some kind of (small) financial harm.
There may be very small differences, but I believe it is also exactly the same in USA.
Judge Judy is not going to give you a dime just because GitHub changed your username. You might still get on the TV show though but only so that she can yell at you publicly for wasting everyone's time.
that is what the previous owner of the twitter x handle said. No compensation or warning. However, Twitter(or X) was exercising their trademark policy. Github just changed OP's username without any warning or breach of any policy.
As a non-American I’m just curious: where does this ideology start to be pushed?
The whole idea of “I don’t like this, so I will sue” isn’t really present to nearly such an extent in the rest of the world.
I’m just wondering if it’s something they teach in school (like a civics class), or if it’s introduced in a more causal fashion (making jokes like “don’t do that or I’ll sue you”), or is it just popular on the news or TV?
It is not pushed; it is a right. It is just a difference in culture. We americans have a strong legal system that is made for small and large cases. On top of that, we are allowed to do it privately by settling matters outside of the legal system when possible. It is not meant to be a “I don’t like this, so I will sue” however a lot of bad actors have popularized this. In fact, if a business acted in a way that was offensive, we have a right to defend ourselves. If there is no way to do that then we are losing something necessary to prevent a dystopian future. I do believe the american schooling system has become to naive and only teach the abstract general education classes.
I believe a lot of it came down to how much American companies had to be sued in the past and presently are because of the lack of regulations. Especially for a lot of newer technologies, or reduction of cost for previously discovered technologies. With current lobbying practices and ease of influence on our government, many people are forced to take things to court to cementify regulations or rights. Sometimes we are forced to take a business or individuals to court because many americans are uncaring for one another and some have tried to screw each other over.
It is not to say this does not happen all around the world. America seems to very loud. It is easy to see and hear about all kinds of things that happen to a large nation like america. While other larger nations either shut down the press or news coverages and are blatantly corrupted. Some of the large nations in europe are not all roped into one another under a single name like "Europe." It is all odd and complex.
I have jumped the gun too early on telling him to sue. I should have asked if he spoke to github before making that suggestion. my bad.
This is a great, reasonable explanation, and I also believe your original comment is getting unfairly dunked on.
The USA has so little regulation to stop corporate wrongdoing, and the regulations that do exist are barely effective (“kid gloves”). The government is ridiculously lenient on companies. Even when they do break the law blatantly, law enforcement is loathe to do anything. As a result, they can basically do whatever they want. Civil lawsuits are one of the the only ways the general public even stands a chance to influence/correct how they behave.
I got dunked on. I casually commented an opinion without thinking of how to put my feelings and thoughts into words. I made the legal option too upfront. It is an eye catching controversial topic to jump on. I am just enjoying myself for now. typing up random ramblings.
> The whole idea of “I don’t like this, so I will sue” isn’t really present to nearly such an extent in the rest of the world.
The US is a capitalistic dystopian hellscape where every organization is a parasite trying to extract every dollar of rent it possibly can, regardless of what it does to the host. Without lawsuits, we'd all be serfs.
> I’m just wondering if it’s something they teach in school (like a civics class), or if it’s introduced in a more causal fashion (making jokes like “don’t do that or I’ll sue you”), or is it just popular on the news or TV?
Civics education in the US is crap. We'd honestly be better off if we did teach these things in school.
Lol, imagine how confused people will be. They will think that there is a mistake somewhere when infact this guy rightfully owned the username username!
It will be done in arbitrage before anything like that. It is perfectly ok to sue a business for inappropriate actions that are not clearly stated or wrongfully done. After closely reviewing Github's policy and terms of service. They do not state they will change your username(with or without notice). Unless the account is "inactively held for future use." I highly doubt OP had been inactive enough to be considered a squatter. Either way, Github needs to update their policies describing why and how someone like OP had to have their username changed without notice. If this happened to me with a username that I carefully crafted and was unjustifiably acted on. I would certainly speak with support then sue them if there is no resolution, hoping to settle out of court because going through the court process is a giant pain for both parties.
If Github has the power to change usernames or account details without notice then I would like them to communicate that to me clearly and upfront. Also, you dont have to pay github to have legal grounds. If the account is used for business purposes(business card, or other forms), then github could cause you financial damages no matter how small. As a business, they should try to be more open and communicative with the users. OP clearly does not have much of a case, which makes that a lame example to bring up this court stuff. This is my bad, however if OP was using his account as we both mentioned then he would have a good case.
Overall, Github should update their policy to communicate more clearly with us. This is something we should demand from them. We can just throw up our hands and say github can do whatever they want. If that was the case and Github came out to say that, I would never do business with them or use their services/platform.
> If Github has the power to change usernames or account details without notice then I would like them to communicate that to me clearly and upfront.
you can want whatever you want, they have no contractual relationship with you and no obligation to consult you about anything.
> Also, you dont have to pay github to have legal grounds. If the account is used for business purposes(business card, or other forms), then github could cause you financial damages no matter how small.
if you haven't paid them there is no contract or any binding commitment or obligation for them to provide you with any service whatsoever
> This is something we should demand from them.
what are you going to demand with? you aren't their customer
> If that was the case and Github came out to say that, I would never do business with them or use their services/platform.
maybe don't build your business on companies you don't have a binding contract with?
Great examples of how letting these private companies act however they feel like will ultimately lead us down to a worse experience and quality of life. Apollo and Tweetbot were great software that made those platforms much more useable and brought a lot of dedicated users to the platform. Now we have is poorly made official apps that offer nothing to the users. I don't use either platforms. I don't have an account with them anymore. I removed myself from them. Yet people like you make them important and justify their decisions. Instead of listening to their userbases' feedback, they instead PR it up and wait till there is only dysfunctional idiots left. TickTock started out as that and everyone else is trying to copy that homework. There are too many people in this world with poor mental health.
We should realize that somehow there needs to be an increase in regulation in business behavior. Even to how businesses treat other businesses that use their online platforms. Internet is too much of a wild west. It just does not seem there is modern actions and behaviors at play here. too narrow minded and thinking of how they are free too whatever they like without consequences.
I used to work at Realm (the mobile database company). In order to keep an eye on what was going on, there was a Slack integration that reposted any mention of @realm on Twitter.
One morning, we woke up to a #twitter channel full of very nearly porn. Young men, scantily dressed, flexing their abs and flashing smiles at the camera.
Turns out someone added a bot on Twitter that would repost things from Instagram to Twitter, except that Instagram allows dots in usernames and Twitter didn’t. I think the IG account was @realm.of.beauty, which was promptly understood by Twitter as @realm.
I'm also @cmg on Twitter, which used to get plenty of Instagram mentions of this type, as well as people thinking I'm CheckMate Gaming, Canadian Media Guild, Cocaine Muzik Group, Chipotle Mexican Grill and all sorts of wild stuff.
We had something similar. Public board that went by an acronym that was also used in gay paddling fetish.
You’d be scrolling through hashtags/mentions of us and occasionally be greeted by some young actor being coquettishly tapped on the bare bum with a cricket bat or something.
I have @CommonFirstNameCommonLastName on Twitter, and I occasionally get mentioned or DMed by people thinking of an entirely different person. It’s not often enough to be too annoying, though.
I get that at work. looking at my name, you would not think it common, but where I live, not only is it common, there are many of us with the same name at my employer.
At my previous job, I decided to make a Slack channel named after one of the C preprocessor directives (#define I think, or maybe #endif). A handful of people found it and appreciated the joke.
But then, a few months later, one of the admins contacted me to ask if it would be okay to delete the channel. You see, in large organisations, Slack knows which channels are not meant to be visible to other parts of the org, and it was causing mentions of the C preprocessor directive to be censored for people outside my group ^^;
Since, as OP says, non-members occasionally could find the channel, it was probably a public channel. The people who complained were probably "multi-channel guests". They'd see masked-out channel names except where they are explicitly allowed.
Ah, no, they wouldn't have been guests. The organisation was large enough that it had multiple “workspaces” corresponding to different divisions. Channels always belong to a workspace, but some are shared between workspaces. You can only see the channels belonging to or shared with your workspace.
I accidentally pasted a backtrace into a github issue outside of a code block. It was a deep stack, with each line prefixed by "#0" "#1", "#2", etc. GitHub decided to turn these into links to the corresponding numbered issues, for every issue, (including back-reference notifications in each of those issues) and there didn't seem to be any way to undo that action.
A bigger problem I've had with issue references is in commits. A repo we used as template was using "Fixes #123" in commits messages, to close tickets filled against that template repo. The problem is that when the updated template was merged in the downstream repo, it would close issues in each of them too...
For QEMU's gitlab issue tracker we deliberately started our issue numbering from a higher number (I think 100 or thereabouts) to avoid that. (We ran into it very early on during the migration from launchpad so it wasn't a big deal to re-number the two or three issues that had already been created with low numbers.)
In many email systems there is an undo send feature. Outside of those closed contexts where yanking a message out of the recipient’s inbox is possible, it is generally implemented by waiting a few seconds between when the UI says the message has been sent and when the message is actually sent. During that interval, an undo send option is offered which simply cancels the upcoming send action.
Yes, and those recall messages only exist in the closed systems where such retraction is possible, or in the open systems which send those messages that are more designed for the closed systems.
The implementation I described with a slightly delayed send doesn’t use those recall messages, since the email being sent doesn’t actually get sent until after the delay. I believe this is how Gmail’s version of the feature works, for example.
That's funny. Sometimes people experiencing a bug @ me because I've recently contributed to the repository. I just reply "LGTM Approved" and then they get mad. I'm like, I don't care what you check into this project. It's not mine!
I once changed my mobile phone number so the last 8 digits were 69696969. I thought this was hilarious. Then I found out that people have randomly scrawled that number on every toilet cubicle "For a good time call XYZ69696969" and I would get calls all the way through the night, every night.
Steve Wozniak had 888-8888 for a while. Which is a très cool number to have, but he was getting hundreds of calls with nothing but random sounds in the background. Eventually he figured out that babies were pushing the buttons on their parent's phones, and all-eights were apparently easy for them to press.
I own a few 867-5309 numbers for different areas. I have them do nothing these days but for a while I let them hit a pbx and we’d get up to 2500 calls a day on each line. Lots of drunk dudes trying to call Jenny.
There's a prank call podcast called The Snow Plow Show, and the guy set up a bot at a phone number that will automatically reply to callers with voice clips from a lady who yelled at him in a prank call one time. So fans of the show will put the number on windshields or craigslist ads so people will call the number and get yelled at, and the calls are all recorded so he can listen back to them later and pull out the better ones.
I think you should utilize a similar technology for your phone numbers.
Hahaha! Never thought I'd see BeverlyBot and Sorry I Dinged Your Car mentioned on HN.
Been listening to RBCP (The guy who does Snow Plow Show and Phone Losers of America) for a long time now. Great to throw on in the background for some laughs at the end of the day while reading.
I once did this by accident when fueling up my car; it just so happened that the gas station's rewards program was linked with the Safeway rewards program, and I happened to be filling up my tank just as the 867-5309 account for my area code hit some critical threshold. Hey presto, 20% off (or something like that; it was a long time ago).
If I was less scrupulous, I can think of a few ways to easily monetize that. The first and simplest is to have a toll line that charges on call and have a recording on the 867-5309 numbers that refers them to call it.
Whether you go the sultry "really meet Jenny" angle or just try to find something that piques the interest of the average drunk male that would call, just to see what they're being referred to, you'd probably get enough takers to turn a tidy profit regardless of how crappy the ultimate toll line was. I doubt it takes all that much to convince callers that are already drunk and trying to do something they think is mildly funny already.
Assuming that Jenny was 21 when the song was written, (since there is a chance the number was written on a bar's bathroom wall) she would be at least 62 years old now.
Statistically, there's at least a 1 in 4 chance that Jenny is dead now, and there is no chance that she didn't change her number after receiving 800 million horny crank calls.
It was about 5 years ago when I realized that 8675309 is hitting all of the numbers on the keypad diagonally in stripes from the upper left to the lower right, skipping 1 for some reason.
On the one hand I'm enjoying wondering what the song would be paced like if instead of touch tone speed each number was separated by how long it would take to return to 0.
Github has some very dangerous features when it comes to tagging and mentions. For example, when you add someone to an organisation, it autocompletes the username. We had someone with a fairly common name and accidentally added someone else to the org with a close but not identical name. Fortunately they didn't accept the invitation before we removed them again and added the correct person.
Right? This bugs me like hell. They make you jump through all kinds of hoops to attestate your source code and use layers upon layers of encryption, but make it the simplest thing to grant someone completely unrelated write access to all of your company’s code. Like what??
you need one of those new fancy GitHub EMU enterprises instead of a normal one. it is driven solely by an identity provider like Okta or AzureAD.
no one outside of your identity provider will ever know about you. your users have a read-only view of the greater github.com, but whatever access you give them within your enterprise.
it's impossible to make anything public in a GitHub EMU enterprise, and your users won't even be able to star repos outside of the enterprise, because that would reveal your presence.
if you can live without any public access to your stuff at all, have a look. you can convert your old enterprise org(s) to a Teams subscription and continue to publish open stuff there, but you'll need personal accounts there, like always.
I had that happen to me before. I accepted the invitation, looked at their stuff, and then submitted an issue/PR to remove myself. They panicked, I laughed a bit.
Yep, I got added to someones internal company trello board oncr. I commented a few times asking to be removed, and when it didn't happen, I started adding suggestions to their product designs. I got removed fairly quickly.
I joined two years after they started which is earlier than I realised. And apparently we're both relatively early adopters given that there's supposedly >100,000,000 users now.
I have a two-letter github username and I wasn't even an early adopter. I only bothered creating an account when it was clear that Github was more than a fad and a few of the projects I contributed to moved there. I tried just my initials and it worked.
Having a two-letter username is less exciting than simply a common word or name, though. Once in a while I get mentioned by accident in issues, or added to some organization. Twice I have had someone beg me to give it to them under the rationalization that it was "really cool" and I wasn't really "doing anything" with it...
EDIT: I just looked up my ID and apparently none of the first half-million people to sign up for a github account tried to brute-force the small-username space.
EDIT2: There are a few single-letter usernames with IDs in the millions, so I wonder if those are somehow "kept in reserve" by github admins and given out to friends or what's the story there.
There are some more three-character user names if you count dashes and digits, which are also allowed in GitHub usernames. Although I think the first one has to be a letter of the alphabet.
Makes me think: Interesting spam vector: create a PR advertising whatever and then @ a bunch of people you scraped.
Also interesting attack vector: get a easily mistaken @ name and then see what you become reviewer on. Add malicious code to that PR and merge.
Edit: also what is stupid is at work when setting up your organisation security access you can add anyone globally in the combo search. No org-only filter is even available!
And of course most people use weird handles for their work or personal githubs. So using their UI you need to be an excellent human string comparator or make sure you copy and paste each persons handle which you meed to figure out for each person.
Attack 3: create a bunch of accounts with a similar name to people who work at target company and hope you get added to an org’s repo by mistake.
I don’t know who should be embarrassed here. That org for having 400K members or Github for apparently having no limits on how many emails can be sent out with a simple `@`.
In any case an honorable mention goes to the useless “lock this now” pile-on comments.
I've been quite embarrassed to discover that linking to a github issue in another repo will create a back link in the linked issue. Removing the link doesn't undo it either, you need to delete the issue completely.
We just discovered this today. We were rather alarmed to find, under an issue for a public repo, a link to a PR in our private repo.
Fortunately, in incognito mode it disappeared, and also when logged in under a different account. So it's not visible to everybody. But for a moment it was a very unpleasant surprise.
"https://github.com./a/b" or "https://www.github.com/a/b" also work as "workarounds". But it is incredibly stupid & annoying that it doesn't even go away after editing it out or even deleting the comment that contained the link.
It's fine, it doesn't ping anybody. Unless you're doing something embarrassing or spammy, I doubt anyone cares. I like being able to see how an issue affects other projects, that can be useful information.
To me it just seems like noise when a "large" issue on a big project references a issue on my personal project with a single user. Having to scroll trough dozens of references would probably be annoying.
If you really, really want to avoid it I'm pretty sure you could use a link shortener (bit.ly etc) behind markdown, and it would mask it (haven't tested)
But please only do this for personal repos where you're the only contributor because otherwise this looks incredibly sus for anyone to click on
I think I stumbled on togithub.com, which simply does a 302 redirect to github.com, which keeps the url understandable and doesn't create the backlink. But I have no idea who actually runs the servers, so I instead went back to a text file.
It's only personal repos, that's why I don't want to create the irrelevant noise for lots of other people.
Could be one of the sibling encodings, like base85 or uuencoded, perhaps? From afar they could look sufficiently similar to base64 that OP got them mixed up?
عينول is a valid name, which can be poorly transliterated to Ai'null
Explaining the joke: The first letter is ain, written as a3 or 'a in some places. Pronounce a' with a soft stop. Because of this, legal names here sometimes include an apostrophe. Normally it's spelled 'Ainul, but one can misspell it.
I’m @trash on GitHub and you’d be surprised how many PRs I get added to. IIRC someone gave me the keys to their repo inadvertently because they thought github.com/trash was a delete function or something.
Lol, we also end up tagging Mr Bean (https://github.com/bean) occasionally when discussing Spring @Bean annotations on a pull request, and forgetting to backtick it.
I do apologize. The core contributors are all in the habit of using backticks (`@ctz`) but an endless stream of new contributors come in and understandably aren't aware of GitHub-flavored markdown.
I used to have an email similar to ps@qs.com, and would get a fair amount of email suggesting people would use that as their made up email. In a similar vein I’d like to apologise to knobs@bobs.com for the amount of captive portal spam you receive on my behalf
I got tagged by accident like this once, and it took me ages to figure out why I was getting emailed about an obscure issue on something I'd never heard of. I think the UX for both parties could be improved quite a bit.
I'm `@3x` on GitHub and I get multiple notifications every day from people mentioning graphics scale factors [1] in issues and PRs. It is a lot of fun to add a "" reaction to everything mentioning me!
We had a bug recently where one of our internal bots didn't correctly parse usernames with hyphens in them, so instead of tagging @tom-jones, it would tag @tom
Talking about failing to parse names, I remember a co-worker once was working on a form and had added a special character validation field to the name field. The only problem was that it blocked apostrophes, and he was Irish so his form wouldn't actually accept his own name.
Thank you. I've been puzzled by that name for literally decades. I always assumed it was a *nix pathname joke about ./ and couldn't figure out why the order was reversed.
> "Slashdot" is an intentionally obnoxious URL. When Rob registered the domain http://slashdot.org, he wanted a URL that was confusing when read aloud. (Try it!)
I like this kind of serendipity. And it still seems to not be abused.
I have @prepend on github and get attend a few times and it’s kind of fun and random as it’s always coding related stuff and random code is still interesting to me.
Sadly, my common gmail gets accidentally emailed a few times a week and is now boring.
I have my HN username at gmail, and the novelty... wears off. So many recipts, confirmations, random bccs... Where it gets really ugly is gmail's (incredibly dumb, imo) feature where dots don't matter. I've had mulitple people get quite insistent that they own the email tyler.e <at> gmail, which of course routes to...
I registered this username at one of the early big name webmail services. Not unimaginably rare, sure, but neither is it jsmith or the like.
You’d be shocked how many different people have signed up for stuff with that email address that I’ve had for like 20 years (and only ever log into so I can check on the mayhem). I’ve had bank notices, home sale records, 2 people creating Facebook accounts, and plenty of other stuff.
If my name were as common as yours, I think I’d be ready to choke someone.
I ended up browsing someone else's "Cloud NAS" once. I had to resist very hard not adding a watermark to all his photos saying "stop registering with my email!!!".
Yep, I have an incredibly common firstname@gmail.com email address and I get hundreds of emails daily with random bills, reservations, bank statements and so on.
I have my first name . last name @ gmail and it’s definitely a reminder of how big the world is. I had previously thought my name was fairly unique. I don’t engage anymore unless it’s a small business trying to get paid.
My girlfriend has a rather uncommon name, but her FirstNameMiddleName@gmail.com gets emails meant for someone else rather frequently. Sometimes it’s even official PII or PHI. She’s tried to let people know but they’re surprisingly sometimes not all that receptive? So I think she ignores it now.
I have a similar issue with my Gmail -- my policy is to try to rectify the issue the first couple times it happens, but then just let it happen. The dull ones I filter away from my inbox, but not the most interesting ones. Some of my favorites:
- Every year the same family in Houston includes me in their email thread about who is bringing what to Thanksgiving dinner.
- I am on the mailing list for a Masonic lodge somewhere in England.
- I get receipts when some guy in Australia orders a pizza from Dominos. I also get McDonalds coupons that I think are meant for the same guy.
- I have at various times been sent the meeting minutes from an AA group in Pennsylvania (I am more persistent with trying to get off this list than the others, given the sensitive nature of it).
- I get the newsletter for 4H a group in Sacramento.
Thanks for starting this thread. I have my first initial and last name for Gmail and it's nice to know I'm not the only one getting all kinds of mail for other people with similar names!
There's a vaguely similar situation on Youtube live chat if your display name is 2 chars, anyone mentioning those 2 chars gets highlighted in red. Can make the chat unreadable.
I don’t get why people would make this mistake on a regular basis. Use backticks—you’re not really writing “plain text” so you can’t write codey goobledigook without something weird happening. Or if backticks are hard to type on your keyboard write `@ name`.
"@adrian that reminds me of the story where a sec researcher bought license plate NULL. And got all the traffic violation tickets which could not be assigned to a license plate."
there's a poor guy on twitter with the @apply handle and its just a constant stream of Tailwind CSS users telling each other not to use him and he sometimes agrees
as @Keyframe i hear ya. Github did something to address it though. I got spammed in large volume once CSS got @Keyframe. Twitter is amusing occasionally though.
There's someone on Twitter with the handle covid, and he was on there long before the pandemic. At the peak of the pandemic, loads of people would tweet stuff and add @covid every day. I always wondered what kind of response they were expecting. (I speculated that they were confused with tagging, but some of them had tags in their tweets.)
