Reminds me of our own quest to stop users from deleting their entire projects by accident in our product. 1st iteration: delete button with a confirmation box (standard stuff). Users click through the box in autopilot mode and still delete their entire projects. 2nd iteration: someone came up with an idea: confirmation box + an additional checkbox (if it isn't checked, the delete button is disabled). Users still mana…
Same here. I finally brought accidentally deleting stuff down to zero by having them type the number they get to lose: "You have 55,231 GitHub stars. Please type 55231 if you want to delete them all." But I guess, if you delete repos often enough, this will also become muscle memory. Edit: Just saw the other comment here suggesting the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033996
Better to flag it as archived. This way they can unarchive if need be.
I feel your pain. I have dropped from 250 to zero for exact same reason ;) The order of magnitude is for sure different, but still, hitting the ground without any warning was a surprise.
A workaround here is to:
- leave the repo public
- move it somewhere else (to private repo)
- reinit original repo with empty content
- once ready, bring back the old repo to previous remote
The real problem is: Why are GitHub stars so important if httpie is so great? Because people cannot judge for themselves if something is great or not, they always need proxies. It would be cool if we could somehow fix THAT.
Any recommendations?
He said "somehow". I think he also believes there isn't an alternative.
Reminds me of our own quest to stop users from deleting their entire projects by accident in our product. 1st iteration: delete button with a confirmation box (standard stuff). Users click through the box in autopilot mode and still delete their entire projects. 2nd iteration: someone came up with an idea: confirmation box + an additional checkbox (if it isn't checked, the delete button is disabled). Users still mana…
GitHub also makes you type out the project name and that still did not help here.
I guess users will always be able to fuck things up.
Best solution would be to offer undos but then people will complain that deleting things does not actually delete. You are keeping data to yourself! Start citing privacy issues etc.
I think people here are underestimating how difficult it is to implement is_deleted in a production system. Literally EVERY query has to be rewritten to reflect the new database schema. If it's not been implemented from the start then you have a considerable re-write, and usually this type of project will not be revenue generating.
Not necessarily. In some ORMs you can have scopes that can be used to append common sub-queries or conditions, such as "WHERE is_deleted=0", and some allow you to specify default scopes that should be appended to every database query (unless explicitly switched off).
I'm just saying: It doesn't need to be a considerable rewrite, it really depends on how your ORM or data layer is implemented.
I think this is getting at the more robust solution. When youtube videos are taken down or made private, they are not deleted necessarily from my playlists. There's simply an indicator that they video is 'no longer available'. I don't see why something similar can't be the behaviour for GitHub stars and watches?
You do lose the title, which is super annoying. "What did I used to have?" Super frustrating feeling. Here's a list of your favourite songs, but two are missing, have fun figuring out which two it is!
I recently discovered a neat trick that if you Google the url for the private video (you still have this in your list), you're likely to find the title of the video, therefore allowing you to at least figure out what it was and seek out a new video.
I wonder how different the response from Github would be if this blog post was instead, "Oops, Github's confusing UI made me delete the entire project metadata... so since we're forced to start fresh we decided to move to Gitlab/sourcehut/etc."
httpie would never do this. Deleting their stars is already a blow for their community, but changing to another provider would kill it.
And yet they specifically call out Microsoft. And then the only consequence is "I will probably take a break from wearing Octocat-decorated t-shirts."
Which makes them come out as hypocrites. You don't get to blame Microsoft for EEE, and then continue to help them with it !!
I suggest you read "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'". You'd learn a lot. https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error... My view is that expecting humans to stop making mistakes is much less effective than fixing the systems that amplify those mistakes into large, irreversible impacts.
This idea - fixing systems that amplify mistakes into large, irreversible impacts-- is why I am against alcohol, marijuana and other mental-state altering drugs for recreational purposes. (I'm not talking about people who really need pain relief from cancer, amphetamines for ADHD, etc.) If no one in the world drank, smoked pot, or did drugs, how much better off would we all be? 100,000 deaths come from alcohol use ev…
I'm scared to see what your sanitized world would look like. Some of the most interesting art, music, and personal perspective has come from the consumption of the substances you deride as unnecessary and destructive.
I really like this post. While the author clearly feels bad about the fact that they've lost his community and that GitHub didn't restore it (which is honestly what any of us would've felt under similar circumstances), they're also focusing towards the future and using their personal experience as a parable all of us can learn from. Lesson 1 on UI design I think is really important. I often think scary popup boxes ar…
I specifically dislike the "Lessons" section, as it throws all the blame on github and doesn't mention the seemingly obvious advice: "make sure you're not on autopilot when taking potentially dangerous actions, on github or any website". Yes, GitHub probably should show the stars in the warning UI, and hopefully that will prevent some of these mistakes. But GitHub makes it pretty hard to make this mistake already - t…
It would be very rare to have lived through an IT career and not make one or two fatal autopilot mistakes. In the 90s and early 00s it was very easy to lose a production system because you did something wrong that you did 1000x times right before. And this is a modern version of it; for me, this should not happen; if I designed GitHub, these people giving stars and watch would get selected based on the visibility of the profile. That hardly costs anything and then the user can just switch between visible and invisible at will and not lose anything. But I have made many similar mistakes in the past which is why I don’t delete stuff usually anymore; I just flag it deleted and gdpr material I encrypt. I simply don’t want either software bugs, hacks or human error to cause any damage. With the cost of storage and the fact that I work only in b2b, this comes at virtually no cost but with a lot of happiness for both our users and myself.
I really like this post. While the author clearly feels bad about the fact that they've lost his community and that GitHub didn't restore it (which is honestly what any of us would've felt under similar circumstances), they're also focusing towards the future and using their personal experience as a parable all of us can learn from. Lesson 1 on UI design I think is really important. I often think scary popup boxes ar…