A recent apology was made by the BBC after it accidentally sent out test data to a large number of subscribers to their News app.
Does anyone have any interesting/amusing stories of test data accidentally being used outside of testing?
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(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 26 2014, @11:27AM
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My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @11:32AM
Hey! You clearly stole that one from my site!
SoylentNews: Where do I sent a DMCA notice?
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Thursday June 26 2014, @02:20PM
look that up on Uncyclopedia.. (i'd give a link but the site is blocked here)
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday June 27 2014, @04:39AM
The Google translation is hilariously appropriate:
====
This page is required to post a comment. It's no longer the fermentation process. Now, some how. Nor, and soft can help you to stop smoking. But the likelihood of the brush film football beating. Beating the Japanese market survey. But antioxidants you need to wise this soft. Storage consumption analysis and afternoon peak. Beating dwell the sad old age and disease, spanned, and advising hunger and the ugly need. Asian markets pricing in the airline. In the News. It's OK to start the selection policies of hatred, that magic pot of the session. We can do this time of freedom and or members of the block. It's exciting, nor the driver of vehicles, fear of its financing strategy, a plethora of insurance issues, but they are. But the will of the players, the players or in the backyard, soft, the sauce is amazing. In the save macro, and sometimes is a lot of mourning, chocolate, some kind of football the United States. But of a lion.
====
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Funny) by stderr on Thursday June 26 2014, @11:29AM
The worst one I ever saw was this one [slashdot.org]. I have no idea why they haven't removed that one yet.
alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" #
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @12:04PM
I'd love to find out how much of an effect has the SoylentNews/Pipedot schism had. I've been back to /. a couple of times since, and if you look at the number of comments per story, they seem to hover at about 3 to 4 times what we get here (it's still far from 10 years ago, when an unpopular story would get 180 comments). But if we're getting 15 comments, they get 45. If those comments were there, they'd work out to about 25% of readership that's here now. In reality, I think it's a smaller portion that left because they still get about 200 comments for "very active" (read "flamebait") stories while our highest seems to be about 120-140. Or maybe they have a higher amount of GNAA posts. In either case, it looks like they're slowly shrinking and we seem to be stable.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by elf on Thursday June 26 2014, @01:31PM
Slashdot gets a lot more moderation too, the amount of 4-5 rated comments is far superior to what's here. I can't say many posts get that much attension with regards to moderation.
Personally I seem to get moderation points when I don't want them and I don't have them when I do. I'd prefer to have a set amount a day I can use / not use so I know there are always points when I need them.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Thursday June 26 2014, @02:05PM
Moderation rework been on my TODO for like two months now. Real life sucks. The current tentative plan is to just give folks mod points, and have them "regenerate" over time to a cap.
Still always moving
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kbahey on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:19PM
Mod this up now!
This is the crux of the problem with SoylentNews: low participation!
I wrote about this here [soylentnews.org] in response to grand plans fo subscriptions, hosting, over engineered infrastructure ...etc.
If this site is to continue, it has to grow in participation. Otherwise, it will just dwindle
Team, please focus on how to grow participation, and make that your prime directive for a year or two.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Tramii on Thursday June 26 2014, @04:22PM
>> Personally I seem to get moderation points when I don't want them and I don't have them when I do. I'd prefer to have a set amount a day I can use / not use so I know there are always points when I need them.
Exactly! I can't tell you how many times I come to Soylent News at the start of the day with no mod points, and read through all the new articles and comments. Then later on in the day, I come back to see if anything new has popped up and suddenly I have mod points! I simply don't have the time to go back through and re-read everything. Having mod points given out at a certain time or day (or at least making them last a bit longer) would greatly help with our moderation woes.
(Score: 1) by schad on Thursday June 26 2014, @04:25PM
I prefer to see a greater variety in mod scores, personally. On the Other Site, there are really only 3 useful browsing levels: +5, +1, and -1. Here, you get those and +3 as well. +5 is for "just the highlights." +1 is for "everything that's not terrible." Well, now we also have +3: "everything that's probably worth reading."
Take your post, for example, which as of this writing is at +3. I think that's exactly where it belongs. It's technically off-topic, so it shouldn't be +5. But it is interesting (otherwise I wouldn't be replying to it!), so it shouldn't be just +1 or +2, either. If I have 15 minutes to kill and I decide to spend them on SN, I want to browse at +3 and see posts like yours. If I have 2 minutes before a meeting, though, I really only want to see the cream of the crop. Which is more-or-less what you get here, and not what you get on the Other Site (where "+5" means either "I agree with you" or "At least it's not about hosts files").
(Score: 2, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday June 26 2014, @12:21PM
Leaving a situation in which the string "Dear Rich Bastard" could appear in the form letters ranks rather high as such an example.
http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/bastard.asp [snopes.com]
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Drake_Edgewater on Thursday June 26 2014, @01:00PM
Thanks, this made me laugh:
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RaffArundel on Thursday June 26 2014, @01:00PM
Yes, I work in a field where this is a very possible situation, and in the last 10 years have seen stupid. Here is some advice:
1. Save these articles. Next time management is too cheap to get you a pre-production environment (because proper dev/cert/prod is too much to ask apparently) show them the damage it can do. Every time I have seen this issue it has been because someone was messing around on the live systems.
2. Keep it professional - even during testing. When testing don't do stupid things like joking around in content. Assume whatever you do during testing will leak when it goes live. If the BBC has used actual (if simply old) news stories the situation would probably have quickly and quietly blown over.
Generally, when Marketing screws up, I gotta fix it - but as I tell them in situations like this, I can't "tech lead" you away from the brand damage. Think before you do. Or ask me, I'll play bad guy.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by len_harms on Thursday June 26 2014, @02:06PM
Very true... Having been burned on this twice.
My boxes and test data is very bland now :(
But I can tell you to this day Robert Dunker had an awesome job bobbing for apples and two lovely kids named Cobbler and Dumpling. He also had a lovely wife Gala from Fiji. They all lived in Nebraska City.
After that day all my data is named test1, test2, test3 :(
(Score: 4, Funny) by mattie_p on Thursday June 26 2014, @01:12PM
janrinok hates when I bring this [soylentnews.org] up.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday June 26 2014, @01:53PM
There's an actual random post generator in /code for testing purposes, we could put the seed text from that article in it :-)
(and just to note, we let people train on dev now instead of production; dev didn't exist at the time of that accident).
Still always moving
(Score: 4, Funny) by bootsy on Thursday June 26 2014, @01:33PM
I have worked in several Investment Banks where a trade that should have gone in the testing system actually flowed down to the production environment and was booked and settled.
Quite a few of these actually went on to make a profit which maybe tells you something.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @01:53PM
I released a debug version of some tracking software we work on that included private info not meant for the public. The thing is my manager told me to release it even after I explained it contained details that shouldn't be made public (even though the info WAS lightly hashed). She said release it any way, but just once, and that the order came from higher up the chain. She later claimed this was an accident. Luckily it only included info on NYC taxi drivers, so no harm no foul. Still, weird incident.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @02:03PM
This one is only slightly apocryphal: [snopes.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by rts008 on Thursday June 26 2014, @02:30PM
LOL!!
Is there anything in Oz that won't kill you? Ninja Kangaroos [sky.com], Drop bears, the worlds deadliest well, everything,(except some of the beer)!
I mentioned that I wanted to visit 'the Outback' to my insurance agent once...when the paramedics shortly thereafter arrived, they had to subdue him with a large dose of elephant tranquilizer.
I was quite impressed by the experience...it turns out the elephant tranquilizer is actually pretty good! ;-)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @02:44PM
Does anyone remember details for this one?
There was this bookstore with a particular book ("100 monkeys" or something) that was used as a test case by the database admins: change to the database, query, "100 monkeys", it works.
However... the queries were allocated, and the book was marked as the most searched one. Eventually the publisher asked the author to write a sequel ("101 monkeys") and he did.
Only later they discovered the truth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @06:53PM
It's a classic WTF story: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-Ive-Got-The-Monkey-Now.aspx [thedailywtf.com]
"When HBSP’s marketing department analyzed the sales trends, they noticed a rather interesting trend. Oncken’s 1974 Who's Got the Monkey? was a run-away best seller! And like any marketing department would, they took the story and ran. HBSP created pamphlets and other distillations of the paper. They even repackaged those little plastic cocktail monkeys as official “Who’s Got the Monkey monkeysâ€."
Ah, the hilarity!
(Score: 1) by Buck Feta on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:49PM
I was listening to the radio once, and could hear the DJ singing (badly) along in the background. A minute later you could hear him pick up the phone and a wise-ass caller asking him to sing a bit with the music. The error continued for about ten minutes until Mr. DJ caught on that the mike and phone line were being mixed into the music.
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @08:20PM
If I had a dollar for every time I saw an ASP.net error message with full variable and stack dump... There is no way that should ever reach the end-luser; he should just see a "we're sorry" message, and the error dump should be sent to the webmaster's pager.