
Ask HN: Anyone else fed up with GitHub's constant spamming? - Tomte
Just a second ago I got a mail. Again. This time it&#x27;s that &quot;you were mentioned&quot; on https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nanvix&#x2F;hal&#x2F;pull&#x2F;160#event-2223260496<p>Obviously, I wasn&#x27;t mentioned. I never interacted with that project. I haven&#x27;t heard of it before.<p>This is a constant annoyance. GitHub spams notification mails for spurious reasons (&quot;your two-letter user name occured inside a large binary blob&quot; – yes, really!), for bad reasons (&quot;someone tried to make his repo known and mentioned you&quot;), and for no reasons (like this today).<p>GitHub&#x27;s support doesn&#x27;t care. More eyeballs for repos are good for them.<p>There are so easy mitigations: don&#x27;t notify people unless they have already interacted with a repo. Don&#x27;t notify people if their username isn&#x27;t mentioned with a &quot;@&quot; in front of it and a &quot; &quot; after it.<p>And I&#x27;m pretty sure I switched off all notifications in GitHub&#x27;s settings the last time I was annoyed by it. Just went there, all notifications are switched back on.
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yorwba
I'm pretty sure most people don't have short enough usernames to get
constantly spammed, so your experience is probably pretty unique.

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Tomte
Hm, I hadn't thought of that (although it probably looks like bragging with a
short user name now...).

Still, I think GitHub should really limit notifications to people who,have
ever interacted with a repo (or organization). I can't really see legitimate
use cases where people should be able to annoy others like this. Most of my
complaint is independent from the user name length, I think.

