We've got a similar problem at my (much smaller) school. I've found that most colleges treat IT as an unfortunate evil, which is reflected in the quality of services they provide. It's strange how these colleges think they can train us for the future while ignoring the massive changes technology brings us.
I used to work for a company that provided IT systems to about half the colleges in America. Your characterization is actually very shallow compared to the reality.
The reality is campuses are some of the most annoying places in the world to try to get IT stuff done. Each department is a fiefdom that thinks they are the most important people in the world. Each fiefdom expects the campus IT group to only care about them, and all technology decisions are made by committees consisting of those people. This is further exasperated by most professors and administrators having a massive fear of change and just wanting to teach like they've been teaching and research like they've been researching for 30 years. Imagine the English department having serious weigh-in on technology topics.
As far as the talent of the workers, in my experience you have a group that is worth every below-industry-standard penny they (don't) earn, who are hoping to not be noticed. But you also have many amazing, talented, extremely dedicated people who could be earning much, much more, but believe in the mission, so sacrifice pay to help support it.
A related event that happened recently to my girlfriend's dad: He was on vacation and had his Blackberry or Outlook autoresponder set to respond to every message (not just once per sender, as I think is normal). Anyway, he bought a movie ticket online and they sent him an automated email asking not to reply. His autoresponder responded, and the auto-reply responded in turn asking him not to email. He turned his phone off after about 10,000 messages (he was in the movie) and didn't get resolved until he visited the office IT the following Monday.
Haha That's a great story, thanks for sharing. I can only imagine him wondering what the hell happened in the office when he saw 10,000 unread messages on his phone! Haha
I bet that one evening will be remembered by the entire student body for the rest of their lives. I can imagine how much fun that must have been during the first 1-2 hours, and then how it turned sour hour, after hour, after hour... fun!
In the 2000, I was working on a big telco company. One day, a guy made the mistake of sending his "hilarious and NSFW" 4 MB PowerPoint presentation email (that was a huge email back then) to a list including EVERYONE working on the company. That means around 2K people just on the same building. According to Wikipedia, right now it has over 250K employees, probably a similar number back in the day. I don't know how many it has back in the day and were affected, but it included for sure all the high executives.
Other than the embarrassment of the NSFW material, the network and email were completely blocked for most part of the day, causing severe troubles, at least to the whole building were I was working.
The guy was an external consultant which was "moved to a different project" :-D It was absolutely epic.
The "pictures of Nic Cage" link refers directly to a Gmail attachment. Not viewable by me, obviously, but I wonder if there is any information in that URL that shouldn't be public.
Way back when I was at Uni the same thing was possible, if I remember rightly though it took them about 3 days to rectify and we were told to just not use email during the period. It was pre-meme days so most of it was just random insults and yo momma jokes.
I was there when this was happening and realized exactly what was going on at the time. Still, it was very very hard not to respond with a 'Stop replying all' type message. There is something about these things that makes it hard to just sit it out and shut up (at least for me).
The list had a broad section of the company. It wasn't surprising to see some of the less computer savvy users responding. I was surprised though when I saw engineers down the hall responding.
It turns out that, for most people (in a corporate setting at least--not sure about college campuses), the problem is that they don't even know how many people they are sending their message to; distribution groups hide how many people are truly on the To line.
We introduced a feature in Exchange 2010 specifically to combat this (as a part of a broader feature called MailTips). In Outlook and OWA, it will warn you as you're composing your message of exactly how many people will get the message.
Blog post introducing the feature (with some really old screenshots):
When the blog post author (Larry Osterman) states that a quarter of 100,000 is 13,000, and that 10% of 13,000 is 130... I start to question if anything the author writes is in any way reflective of what actually occurred.
I go to a small school that still grants all-campus email access to everyone. It develops a culture of communication all its own, and often hosts vigorous and even nasty arguments. And while the role it plays could be filled much better by other technologies, email is a common enough technology that everyone can take part.
I went to a similar school: one of my fondest memories from college is the raw, unfiltered discussion that took place on those mailing lists. And due to the mail client's ability to thread discussions I could ignore topics that were of no interest as well.
I think OVH had a similar issue back when they were giving away test servers. I wasn't on the list, but I heard from several people that the official question/reply address would send emails to everyone on the list. Needless to say, with several thousand people on there, it got spammy fast.
I was there!! At least we got free shipping on our Guinness World Record certificates. I think they were charging $30 or something for it, which was ridiculous.
Actually, this makes me wonder why every institution doesn't have an unregulated broadcast channel like this. Seems like it's a great way to embrace community. And I bet you that, if you run it long enough, there'd be some tangible value come from it, as well as the intangible value of fun.
In physical environments, we all have 'water cooler' conversations all the time. As we move more into 100% virtuality, is there a need for a digital analogue (if you'll excuse the somewhat jarring juxtaposition of phrases there)?
And this is how you miss out on the amazing things that can happen when one part of your organisation starts talking in an unscripted way to another part that it doesn't normally talk to.
Most colleges do. When I was in college, we has a similar incident. The Bursar sent out an email to all students, one student reply-all's, and a deluge of messages followed. I thought it was pretty funny. After a day or two, the sysadmin shut of the listserv and reminded everyone of usenet-esque newsgroup that had existed for years but no one used.
Networks like these popup and are cool because they're underground of sorts. That makes them appealing and interesting.
1. It encourages skip leveling, ie attempting to resolve problems in a public forum rather than going through the proper channels.
2. It presents a security risk. Too many people discussing what could be restricted information.
3. It detracts from productivity by giving people something to do other than focusing on their work. Adding peer pressure to be a part of the discussion adds fuel to the fire.
Yep, I work in a small, very distributed company. We use Hipchat and specifically have a tab that contains everyone in the company for that purpose. It's good to be able to occasionally just talk shit with folks you otherwise only meet once or twice a year.
A couple guys at my college (Claremont McKenna) were somehow able to copy all of the student web addresses into an e-mail and proceeded to market their on-campus moving company, then later that list was abused to advertise parties and people angry about their name being included on these threads...
I worked at an airline once. Before I joined, a member of staff at a small airport received an email telling them that Bill Gates will give them $5 to forward some email. They believed it, and decided to forward it to all the staff. That was 10,000 people, and sent over an analog leased line.
Reminds me of the time I was volunteering in an office, I must have been 15? And there was a solar eclipse, so I used "net send" to broadcast "Come and watch the eclipse on the roof" to every computer in the building. It was pretty cool; a few dozen people showed up.
amazingly this has happened to me @ every career level minus startup... university constantly between multi-hundred person classes and departments, multi-thousand person logistics company, and all_the_freaking_time @ HP... there were probably 5,000+ sales, consultants, solutions people who would ratchet one of these storms up about every 2 weeks...
Back when Reddit was younger, there was a guy named P-Dub who needed some help. I forget the actual reason he needed help, but people ended up donating some money to him, and all was good.
A few days later, P-Dub's mother decides to email everyone who helped P-Dub. Guess what she did (or forgot to do).
The fallout resulted in people begging to be let off the reply-all list, and for weeks no such mercy was granted.
It took a few months before everything settled down, and to this very day, someone on the list (of only ~100 people or so) will occasionally start it up again.
Haha good times. The donation was actually for P-Dub's mom. It was P-Dub who set up the email for his mom and failed to put the email list in bcc. I had to set up a gmail filter to get out of that madness.
Funny I have always remembered P-Dub as the guy whom you tell to do his homework if you ever see him on reddit. I think you're thinking of the soap guy.
P-Dub is the same guy, there was later some fallout re: donation situation. His "fame" through the homework meme and a few other things was what allowed him to be the subject of such "support" from the community.
As an NYU student I was inundated with these messages for a bit. I seriously thought about replying to all to give everyone step-by-step directions on creating a Gmail archive filter, but decided it wouldn't really help too much.
Last year here at MIT a bunch of people did that. They also sent out detailed instructions with links to remove yourself from the list. Didn't work, but someone killed the list after a few hours.
My employer is a global IT company and the exact same thing happens on mailing lists for 10,000+ people. I reply-all to let them know that there is cake in the lunch room.
One time in college one of these reply all things happened in a chemistry class of mine with about 600 students. It wasn't enough to take any servers down, but I did end up with several hundred new emails consisting of "Please remove me from this list" and "STOP PRESSING REPLY ALL"
I've never understood why people default to reply all to something.
I once had two gmail addresses forwarding to each other on accident. If you're wondering if Google has some sort of check for that, the answer, at least at the time, was several million nos.
I stupidly tried to do that some time ago (got confused juggling with my spammed mail addresses that are all forwarding to my main email address), and Google told me it was a bad idea.
A student group I was a sysadmin for had partially switched to Google Apps for mail from a self-hosted mail server, but for those who were still on the local server, some of them had set up their email to simply forward to their university address. University addresses expire an undetermined time after you graduate, so eventually when this happened to someone who had setup forwarding, it would trigger a horrendous forwarding loop of bounce notifications which would forward back and forth between our server and the university server and rather quickly fill up our (fairly small) mail partition and crash the whole machine. Thankfully these days everyone is on Google Apps so if they're doing forwarding they're doing it through that and thus I don't think you get bounce loops, and most people just check that address directly anyway.
Same thing happened at my university. Chair of the student's committee accidentally included the list as a cc instead of bcc. My brother managed to rickroll the whole campus.
Soon after the security of the listserv was fixed.
78 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadThe reality is campuses are some of the most annoying places in the world to try to get IT stuff done. Each department is a fiefdom that thinks they are the most important people in the world. Each fiefdom expects the campus IT group to only care about them, and all technology decisions are made by committees consisting of those people. This is further exasperated by most professors and administrators having a massive fear of change and just wanting to teach like they've been teaching and research like they've been researching for 30 years. Imagine the English department having serious weigh-in on technology topics.
As far as the talent of the workers, in my experience you have a group that is worth every below-industry-standard penny they (don't) earn, who are hoping to not be noticed. But you also have many amazing, talented, extremely dedicated people who could be earning much, much more, but believe in the mission, so sacrifice pay to help support it.
Other than the embarrassment of the NSFW material, the network and email were completely blocked for most part of the day, causing severe troubles, at least to the whole building were I was working.
The guy was an external consultant which was "moved to a different project" :-D It was absolutely epic.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/10962...
The list had a broad section of the company. It wasn't surprising to see some of the less computer savvy users responding. I was surprised though when I saw engineers down the hall responding.
It turns out that, for most people (in a corporate setting at least--not sure about college campuses), the problem is that they don't even know how many people they are sending their message to; distribution groups hide how many people are truly on the To line.
We introduced a feature in Exchange 2010 specifically to combat this (as a part of a broader feature called MailTips). In Outlook and OWA, it will warn you as you're composing your message of exactly how many people will get the message.
Blog post introducing the feature (with some really old screenshots):
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2009/04/28/34073...
That was.... not a fun day.
In physical environments, we all have 'water cooler' conversations all the time. As we move more into 100% virtuality, is there a need for a digital analogue (if you'll excuse the somewhat jarring juxtaposition of phrases there)?
Cost-benefit analysis says no.
Networks like these popup and are cool because they're underground of sorts. That makes them appealing and interesting.
1. It encourages skip leveling, ie attempting to resolve problems in a public forum rather than going through the proper channels.
2. It presents a security risk. Too many people discussing what could be restricted information.
3. It detracts from productivity by giving people something to do other than focusing on their work. Adding peer pressure to be a part of the discussion adds fuel to the fire.
I'm not saying I agree with these.
A few days later, P-Dub's mother decides to email everyone who helped P-Dub. Guess what she did (or forgot to do).
The fallout resulted in people begging to be let off the reply-all list, and for weeks no such mercy was granted.
It took a few months before everything settled down, and to this very day, someone on the list (of only ~100 people or so) will occasionally start it up again.
Reminded me of the Multi-National Banana War http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...
Great times though.
The replies were typically broken into two camps:
1) Those who, despite the ever growing list of replies, couldn't work out what was happening and asked for themselves to be removed from the list.
2) Those who understood the phenomenon but added fuel to the fire nonetheless by sending out a "Would everybody please stop replying all" mail.
Inevitably some more #1's would get confused send more 'please remove me' mails until a another #2 would complete the cycle once more.
Every. Time.
I've never understood why people default to reply all to something.
Soon after the security of the listserv was fixed.