Stop spamming my contacts without my consent!

[silverbucket]

It is a very unethical thing to do, and shockingly arrogant for an open source project.

[ligi]

Yea - same here - just got a mail from a follower complaining about this. Was not aware this happens when signing in - really not cool ;-(

[hsanjuan]

Same here, how can I delete all my data from your platform?

[pujiaxun]

really angry!

[XenGi]

The consent was given by a very tiny checkbox which is on by default. I just checked after getting the spam myself. Maybe make the checkbox more visible and default to disable it.

[asvrada]

Same here. Although this repo is well made, the spamming literally destroy everything else. I am not recommending this to my friend and I will no longer use it.

STOP IT.

[silverbucket]

Yeah it's a shame that clearly so much good work went into this project and yet someone thought that spamming everyone in the users github list by default, before the user even sees the page, was a good idea. Totally killed this project for me, there's no world in which I would allow an app to email everyone that is following me on github, about anything, ever. Ever heard of a share button?

[Ruxton]

It shouldn't even be a checkbox option. Let alone an intentionally deceptive one. Very weak.

[aweimeow]

I even don't notice there is a checkbox for this action, after I authorized with GitHub account, it started to scan my profile, and send out invitation automatically. I realized this app send invitation after heard from my friend, very uncomfortable with send mail to my contact. You SHOULD remove this function, it's useless and offend.

[foursixnine]

I just got also a message from a colleague getting spammed by this app... :/ Was quite nice... until this. If you want to invite people to use your app, please make sure that you ASK THE USER, before peforming this kind of actions...

[boredstiff]

If you all would like to report this like I am about to do, you can do so here: https://github.com/contact/report-abuse?report=sourcerer-io

[boredstiff]

It's also really scummy that in your README, you don't list what your real intentions are:

Why do you need GitHub permissions?

We use emails to identify commit authorship, read orgs access to get list of public repositories that you've contributed to. You also need to grant access to read this public information from an organization.

[osilla]

Hi everyone. We apologize for the confusion our UX is causing. To clear up any issues, we present the choice to notify your followers on signup when you choose to analyze your public repositories (see attached). Regarding GitHub permissions, we do not use the GitHub API to read email addresses. Our tool only looks at publicly available addresses from the public repositories a user submits and then notifies some of them should the user not optout.

We take your feedback seriously and are looking into ways to make this option more apparent.

[foursixnine]

It took you 7 days to take this seriously?... That’s sad. Please, instead of making it par of the sign up workflow, make it an explicit user action. I normally don’t want to send invitations to people, for services that I use. Not even facebook.

Sent from my iPhone

On 22. Nov 2018, at 18:48, Ryan Osilla notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi everyone. We apologize for the confusion our UX is causing. To clear up any issues, we present the choice to notify your followers on signup when you choose to analyze your public repositories (see attached). Regarding GitHub permissions, we do not use the GitHub API to read email addresses. Our tool only looks at publicly available addresses from the public repositories a user submits and then notifies some of them should the user not optout.

We take your feedback seriously and are looking into ways to make this option more apparent.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[boredstiff]

I am not someone who connected an account, so why do I have to get spam email because someone else doesn't pay attention?

• It's apparently not clear enough for people that don't pay attention
• Why should a user whom I've never contributed toward have access to spam me?
• I, as someone who didn't (and won't) connect my account, did not give permission for you to have my email.
• Our tool only looks at publicly available addresses from the public repositories a user submits and then notifies some of them should the user not optout: I have never interacted with the user who spammed me. So this can't be true. The closest degree that we may have interacted is that I may have interacted in a repository in which they also interacted via a third party's repository
• Your email has an "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of it, so you're doing something with it, you're storing it somewhere.

The bottom line is: don't spam people that aren't asking for it. It's extremely unethical and it turns people off toward your application. On the surface, it does look like a very neat app and one that I would have been interested in using for myself - I love looking at data like this. But because of this practice, I will instead warn people away from it at this point.

[osilla]

hi @foursixnine i'm so sorry for the delayed response. It's really unacceptable of us.

[osilla]

hi @boredstiff thank you for this. Please know that we are looking into this, both from the UX perspectives as well as the email associations our algos determine.

[silverbucket]

@osilla What do you mean "looking into this" ? Just remove it. Add a "share" button if people like it they can share. Don't email peoples contacts just to promote your app before the user even decides if they like it. Meanwhile, you're still spamming contacts so you can unethically generate buzz for your app.

[osilla]

hi @silverbucket fair point.

[osilla]

hi @hsanjuan This thread got so long, I missed seeing your request. Very sorry about that. A user can delete all their data under Account in Settings.

Here's the link to the page: https://sourcerer.io/settings#account

[foursixnine]

@osilla Did you guys ever do anything to fix this?. Did you manage to implement @silverbucket's suggestion?. Or simply are just waiting it out?. Not cool.

[osilla]

hi @foursixnine - we have not been waiting it out. we have implemented a number of measures and more are in progress.

[XenGi]

Could we all calm down a bit? wtf... They did something that the community doesn't like. They listened and acted. Now let them do their work and stop bashing. A more civilized tone would be very appreciated. Some people in here act like children..

[sergey48k]

Closing this as not relevant any more. We no longer provide this feature.