Why do they even delete those stars?
When the repo goes private, people who can’t see it any more can’t have it in their list of starred repos.
We lost 54k GitHub stars
11–20 of 697 posts
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#12It does strike me as unfair that GitHub themselves made the exact same mistake but were able to fix it with database backups.
Internal vs External support.
Internal support is inherently limited: the single organization is of limited size.
External support has no limit in scope, you have to setup SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), communicate expectations, likely hire support staff...
Look at it this way: internal support is helping your friends, but external support requires setting up contracts.
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#13Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#14That's crazy that a manual error by someone, for whatever reason, end up being an article blaming Github for all sort of reasons. And never accepting that the thing that really failed here is the user who performed the action.
It is a big failure by github that making a repo private immediately and irrevocably destroys all the stars.
That's a much bigger failure than clicking the wrong button.
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#15Starred and watched again, it's a great project, hopefully the whole audience comes back soon
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#16https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/26/num/ makes a similar point. I don't remember us saying people only have themselves to blame when that article was posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24904204). Not sure why we're doing it on this post, which makes a number of completely reasonable and specific suggestions for improvement.
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#17That comparison spot the difference pic is really scary. I had to check it 2 times myself before I could spot that the last line is different.
Now that you're on the HN's frontpage, hopefully somebody from Github upper management will see this and all will be good soon thanks to gold old HN (especially when they did the same thing themselves and restored it).
Wish you the best.
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#18Ugh that sucks
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#19Why do they even delete those stars?
When the repo goes private, people who can’t see it any more can’t have it in their list of starred repos.
So mark the repo as private without their permission to view and have queries for starred repositories ignore repositories you can't view - that's an extremely frequent approach to take with complex permission and social functions. I completely understand that not everyone has time to build everything and software is an evolving process - but soft deletion for social links is my default state of mind (then you overlay it with indexing or caching or whatever your performance flavor is to make sure those soft deleted rows don't exist in the active query space).
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#20Why do they even delete those stars?
When the repo goes private, people who can’t see it any more can’t have it in their list of starred repos.
Why not?
I think the respectful solution is to show it as "you starred X, it's private now, you can unstar if you like" (make sure if the name changes privately then the new name isn't shown).
Such a solution is not only good in the case of mistakes like this, it also doesn't gaslight the person that starred a repo only for it to disappear from their list.