One of Pradiptas children

Ok, so I put this into a comment on a previous post, but the phenomena has continued to spawn new children, so I thought I'd add to it.

Two days ago I opened my inbox to find it bursting with the results of an epic cascading thread. An overzealous recruiter had made a massive faux pas. He spammed 416 random rails-related folks with a Rails job offer... but put all their email addresses into the CC field.

The list ran the gamut of Rails, from those who'd barely touched it once, through the average rails developers (such as myself) right up to community luminaries such as DHH and Ryan Bates (of RailsCasts fame).

Reverse flash mob

After a few responses using reply-all, and the typical "don't use reply-all" (using reply-all), suddenly the mailing list became self-aware. Despite being accidentally gathered together in one place through an epic mishap, we recognised that we had a common interest... and a captive audience.

Most members of the group took advantage of this to chat about upcoming Rails conventions and what work we all did, and where.

Within two hours a google group (pradiptas-rolodex) was formed. Swiftly following were:

• A starting blogpost
• A facebook group
• A twitter link
• An IRC channel (#pradipta on FreeNode)
• A plugin: acts_as_pradipta

Sadly the wiki page keeps being deleted...

Anyway, it's been fun.

Highlights from the original thread

The post that began it all

I have a couple of Ruby on Rails position, wanted to know if you are
interested?


Max Archie
Technical Recruiter
Prodigus Source

The post that unified us as a community.

> PLEASE TAKE ME OFF THIS CRAZY EMAILING LIST!!!

Please KEEP ME ON THIS CRAZY LIST!!!

You all seem like pretty interesting folk, and perhaps serendipitously
we've all been added to the same ruby on rails marketing schloc. Even
more interesting to me, is that both my friend Harper and I are on it,
so hell they guy at least has good taste.

So in the spirit of fun email lists

Hi, I'm Anders Conbere, I Hack, run a co-working space in Seattle, and
love me some erlang and python.

What do you guys think of starting a google group I was thinking

"Igotfuckedinbanglalore"

~ Anders

P.S. I've thoughtfully removed our spammer from future communication

The best repsonse to the ad

Hi Max,

I am a recruiter who has an opening for a top-tier recruiter such as
yourself.  I need someone who can unwittingly set off the fury of *at least*
400 people, while ignoring all basic email etiquette.  Would you be
interested?   If not, do you know anyone else who is currently looking for
such an opportunity?

Sincerely,
Thanks for the mile long email thread out of freakin nowhere

Best representation of pradipta's mistake in code

PS:  Sorry for crashing anyone's iphone, but I couldn't resist replying.

module Recruiter
   class Email
      def initialize(site = "http://workingwithrails.com/")
          @recipients = Recruiter::EmailHarvester.harvest(site)
      end

      #
      # TODO: Really should change this to do a BCC instead of a TO
      # so 416 people don't get spammed and start an internet phenomenon of
      # replying to this message until the entire internet crashes.
      #
     def send_email(to_recipients, message_body =
File.read("really_bad_generic_email_body.txt") )
        @message = EmailMessage.new
        @message.to = to_recipients
        @message.body = message_body
        Mailer.send(@message)
     end

   end
end