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We lost 54k GitHub stars

httpie.io

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Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#271

Post by Jowsey »

maleldil wrote: post #249
ncmncm wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, have there be no need to undo anything. Why should ticking the "private" flag have any effect on anything else? If you wanted an effect on something else, a separate button "Nuke all 53,675 star from this repo", with its own protections, would suffice.

How would stars and watchers work on a private repo, though?

Could just make them inactive for a while, but still registered.

Stop sending notifications to watchers, and replace the repo in the stargazer's starred list with a "The following starred repos are currently private and cannot be viewed:" and make the stars be remove-only for a while.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#272

Post by kelnos »

I agree that it would be more clear if the visibility-change dialog included some stats about the repo so you can confirm at a glance that it's the right one, but... it asks you to type the full name of the repo before it will allow you to proceed.

If you do a copy-paste of what it tells you to type, that's on you. The entire point of that box is to get you to think about what you are doing, and explicitly type out the name of the thing you want to change.

Perhaps I've interacted with GitHub's UX enough to be familiar, but when OP put up a side-by-side screenshot and asked, "A 54k-star question: Which one of these two dialogs is safe to confirm and which one deletes a 10-year-old community?" ... I looked at the two boxes, saw the repo it was asking to modify in both cases, and immediately knew the correct answer!

I get that the ideal is that every person who takes any kind of action knows what they are doing and never makes a mistake. I don't know if it's realistic to expect that outcome, but certainly that's the ideal. But how far should UX designers bend over backwards to cater to people who perform destructive actions without paying attention to what they're doing?

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#273

Post by jimmaswell »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #241
bsuvc wrote: post #84

Sure, the author should be responsible. Yes, GitHub should have a better UX around this action. But... There is another thing to consider: Is it really necessary that a repo that is accidentally made private and then made public should lose its stars anyway? Is that really what the repo owner or the people who starred the repo even want to happen?

Let's assume that the stars don't go away when the repo is made private. There are a couple of options: - The users can still see all their stars and find the private repo, which makes it not private. - The users can't see all their stars, they can only see their stars for the public repos. There's no way to find or unstar a private repo that you starred while it was public. This would lead to the situation that if y…

> The users can't see all their stars, they can only see their stars for the public repos. There's no way to find or unstar a private repo that you starred while it was public. This would lead to the situation that if you unstar everything and make sure you have zero stars, you could wake up the next week with 1 starred repos, and then with 3 starred repos, because some repos went public again.

Sounds fine and expected to me.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#274

Post by umvi »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #27

GitHub made a cardinal UX design sin here: never use a warning when you mean undo [1]. If they had given even a five minute grace period before starting the irreversible process of removing all the watchers, this wouldn’t have happened. https://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning/

It's understandable why warnings are used instead of undos though. Warnings are dirt simple to implement - probably a single line of code in most languages. Undo is very complex by comparison. You have to flag something for deletion and put it into some sort of deletion queue that somehow gets deleted at some future date, etc.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#275

Post by eyelidlessness »

tshaddox wrote: post #132
FabHK wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what else they could have done to try to prevent it. As the author of the post suggests: Prominently spell out "This will remove 54,000 stars." vs. "This won't remove any stars (there are none yet)."

I'm not convinced that would have really solved the problem. One could just as easily post a screenshot of two nearly identical dialogs where the only different is that one says "This will remove 54 stars" and the other says "This will remove 54,000 stars" and the same argument could be made that "the only way to notice the difference is if you happen to notice those 3 zeros."

I think the only people who won’t notice three trailing zeroes are people who don’t need to

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#276

Post by ncmncm »

acheron wrote: post #220
FabHK wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that mindset, planes would still fall out of the sky every month. Because basically 90% of plane crashes used to be "pilot error". If you then say, well, it was pilot error, bad pilot, can't do anything about it, that's the way it is, pilot should've not made an error... well, then we wouldn't have reached the amazing aviation safety we have now.

I think there might be a difference between losing a plane and losing your “GitHub stars”.

It is a difference of degree.

People making bad UIs make them that way regardless of consequences for users.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#277

Post by anm89 »

Just went and starred the repo. Looks like they are back up to around 5% of their original star count. Not good but probably not a catastrophe for the project.

It seems the loss of watchers is still an issue though.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#278

Post by ikiris »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #204
capableweb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That 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. That's not the only difference. The other difference is that you also have to type the full repository name, including the organization name. If they wanted to delete the correct repository, they would have to type httpie/.github, but instead they typed httpie/httpie. It's u…

> That's not the only difference. The other difference is that you also have to type the full repository name, including the organization name. This is not true. We had an internal tool at a previous job that required you to type the name of a service's cluster into a field before deleting it. Automated deployments sometimes got left behind - and users would go in periodically and clean them up. If you watched folks,…

I mean obviously users are going to cut and paste that output. It's completely hostile design in terms of usability on their part. What did you expect to happen?

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#279

Post by sbarre »

farmerstan wrote: post #250
sbarre wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you RTFA he did actually read the dialog box (which is where he found out that it would delete the stars) he just didn't notice the 1 line in a 30+ line generic modal. He accepts responsibility for what he did, but points out the very real opportunity to improve the UI/UX of a very destructive operation with real contextual data about what is about to be destroyed.

I did RTFA. I do not accept the excuse that he didn’t read it properly. He skimmed it because he thought it was the same box but it wasn’t. He even admits that it contained the exact information that he was looking for. I don’t see any way he can complain.

Ok then.

I hope others are less judgmental of you than you are of them next you make a mistake in life.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#280

Post by ncmncm »

_moof wrote: post #264
HellsMaddy wrote: post #206

In America, we blame individuals when systems fail. We don't have to, we can actually design systems to be better. Design isn't just about making things look pretty. Good design reduces entropy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra_0DgnJ1uQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_factors_and_ergonomics

Thankfully there are exceptions to this, notably aviation. Having all accidents investigated by an independent board with a systems approach has proven to be an extremely successful model. It's a shame it isn't replicated elsewhere.

A disgrace. It's not like it is any easier in aviation than anywhere else.

Civilian oversight of police departments could be instituted, too, investigating killings and maimings by police. It could be federally supervised, instead of relying on every state, county, and Podunk town to institute it.

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