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Ask HN: GitHub notification spam using private forks?

6 points by blattimwind ↗ HN
I noticed a couple of emails from GitHub that I have been subscribed to two UnrealEngine forks, which contain garbage / an ad for some project. Both of these private repositories have well over 100k watchers now.

Seems to me like GitHub lacks in the validation department not only for for GitHub Pages...

7 comments

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danielpetrica
It's I can confirm this issue for me. It looks like that someone given all the Unreal Engine users push rights, this prompted the GitHub system to automatically subscribing them to the repository.

This prompted a lot of spam which it seems like its breaking the front page, prompting the unicorn page. If you have this issue try to navigate to a different page to access your settings and edit the auto-subscription settings.

To disable this setting got to https://github.com/settings/notifications and un-tick the 'Automatically watch repositories' settings.

The repository seems to be these [1] & [2]. I'll advise anyone in the unreal engine to go and un-watch them as they are full of spam.

[1] https://github.com/FlameOfIgnis/UnrealEngine [2] https://github.com/mad00ness/UnrealEngine

strobe
I also got notifications like this at today.
jpetrucc
I'm also seeing this issue - started getting emails this morning about being subscribed to multiple forks, now I am unable to load GitHub at all
danielpetrica
It looks that only the dashboard doesn't work as is trying to load all that spam commits/activity. Other pages like your profile should work.
mkane848
Just got hit with three myself, but looks like they're already taken down.