So I have a small web app I made. I didn’t really advertise much because there’s a lot of things I wanna fix in it and I don’t have the time. But I did tell a few classmates about it.
Last few days I noticed it had been running slowly. Until one day it just stopped working. I checked the server logs and there was a background worker trying and failing to insert some data into the db on loop because of a bug I didn’t notice. The data it was trying to insert was spam so I knew this was an intentional thing. I took the server down and in the process accidentally deleted all the logs. Oops.
So I go and check the database and the user who inserted the spam data used their actual email. I google it, find their GitHub, their twitter, and their fiverr which has their actual name and picture. I search their name in my university system and find them. It’s someone I don’t know. Someone who heard from a classmate I told about it.
Fixed the bug now, banned the account, removed the spam. I guess you could say they did me a favor catching the bug but they could’ve just told me about it lol.
The only question left is: should I contact them? Send them a subtle 'I know what you did" message on the uni portal?
Don’t escalate unless you want to deal with more of this
“Don’t deal with this unless you want to deal with it” my sibling in Christ, that’s what dealing with it means.
That’s not what I said - I said don’t escalate. The problem has already been dealt with by fixing the bug. There’s a chance that’s the mystery dickhead will never be seen again if you make it a non-event. If you reach out and taunt them, you’re just asking for more trouble
Which is why you don’t “reach out and taunt them”, but report them to the university.
This has some real strong “well if she didn’t want to get raped she shouldn’t have been dressing like that” energy
It absolutely doesn’t. The comment doesn’t assign blame to OP at all, it’s a recommendation that continuing to engage with this person will just cause more problems - a pretty normal thing to acknowledge when it comes to dealing with petty, weird people who just want to mess with strangers.
Nothing happened here except a small project website temporarily lagging. Nobody has been assaulted here, which makes this an extremely different situation than that.