Answers spamming users

[Jo-Anne MacLeod]

Anyone else having problems with Answers today? I responded to a post a few minutes ago, and since that time answers has sent over 4000 messages. I managed to get finally get it to stop by unsubscribing to the question. I didn't subscribe to it in the first place though.

Atlassian, any thoughts?

[Jeremy Largman · Accepted solution]

Sorry everyone! I'll look into this asap.

Edit:

It looks like Answers got into a loop when GLF accepted Jo-Anne's answer here. The activity stream shows the repeated loop. Accepting the answer myself resolved the looping.

Anyone who was subscribed to this question would've gotten the spam - most likely people watching all new questions or subscribed to the jira-development tag.

Please track ANSWERS-252 for a resolution.

[Jo-Anne MacLeod]

Funny because i was thinking along the same lines. If you want to run a test, I am willing to answer a 'test' question that you post and then have you accept it. In theory I will start to get spammed. This itme i know how to stop it though.

[Jeremy Largman]

My current thinking is that an issue occurred related specifically to a user accepting a specific question. See the user activity here.

I'm still trying to understand what happened, but I'm beginning to think it might be specific to the question Jo-Anne answered. I suspect anyone who was subscribed to that question would have gotten this spam. Can anyone help confirm or deny that?

[Dave Thomas]

Yes, it was email from that one question that was the problem. I was subscribed to a couple of tags, so I guess that's why I got the notification emails. I got several thousand identical emails about Jo-Anne's question before it finally stopped. I've unsubscribed from everything and put an email rule in place to permanently delete anything from Atlassian Answers at the moment. When it's safe to go back in the water, I'll have to reverse all that.

[Jeremy Largman]

No need for that. Other answers have been accepted since this started. I believe it was a one-time issue for that question. I'll hunt through the logs and code base to find the root cause. I'm guessing it's going to be a hard-to-identify issue that happens on rare occasion. Based on the fact that the activity stream was re-posting that one activity over and over hundreds of times, and now it's stopped, I believe the issue is resolved. I'll of course maintain a close watch on this.

By the way, the way I got it to stop was to accept the answer myself.

[Jo-Anne MacLeod]

Thanks Jeremy, I'll go with it being resolved now, as I am no longer getting spammed.

[MattS]

I thought it might be a new feature - get enough karma and you can spam the community ;-)

[Jo-Anne MacLeod]

Jeremy if you are still watching this quesiton. I just got spammed (but on a smaller scale - only 40 emails) on another thread. so I don't think that the problem is completely resolved yet.

[Jo-Anne MacLeod]

adding a test answer to this question (please ignore this answer).

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Great idea! Unsubscribe from the question!! Why didn't I think about it before? Was going to create a filter in mky mailbox. Thx Jo :)

[Dave Thomas]

I'm getting the same thing.... thousands of emails notifying me of the same action over and over.

Edit: I can't get it to stop either. I've told it to stop all notifications, I've unfavorited all tags, etc. The emails just keep on coming :-(

[Jo-Anne MacLeod]

even more weird, when I clicked on the "Unscribe..." link on the right it did fix it. In fact I'm not getting spmaed any more (thank goodness because it was almost 6000 email by the time I was able to get it to stop).

I've added a new tag to this question in case Atlassian has a filter and will move it higher in their priorities. That said, it is only just 8am in San Fransico so they probably haven't even seen the problem yet.

[Jeremy Largman]

I would love as much info on this as possible. I'm close to wanting to shut down our mail server while I figure this out, but I'm not yet sure the scope (ie is it happening to everyone? So far it's not happening to me). Can you post which question this happened on - which one you unsubscribed from? Also, are there other answers or comments you've posted for which this did not happen?

[Jo-Anne MacLeod]

I answered the question "How to Assign a issue to a group" (or a subject name very similar to that). I only experience the problem with that one question. I have bene able to add comments to questions without problem. It was interesting that I had to unsubscribe to the question, when I had never subscribed to it in the first place.

I'm running, Safari on a mac (in case you need that information)

I'm going to try an 'answer' to this question to see if the problem reoccurs. stay tuned...

Edit - I should also mention that I wasn't paying attention so I never noticed if there was any sort of delay fore the problem started.

I just answered my own question here and it seems to be ok, as it its not spamming me.

[Jeremy Largman]

Thanks Jo-Anne. I've put up a yellow notification banner to help see if anyone else is having this problem (and to communicate the workaround you found).

By the way, you're auto-subscribed to questions that you answer, so that part is actually the expected behavior. The spamming obviously is not. I'm still not yet sure if this is a one-time fiasco or not.