601–610 of 697 posts
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Warnings are vastly less useful than making such activities less dangerous. If you feel something needs get giant flashing warning messages perhaps make it reversible for a week.
I don't know for sure but I think in some jurisdictions "hang on to this data you told me to delete for another week" would be a non-starter.
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Funny thing is that I have never typed in a repo to delete. I always just copy/paste from the message. It's probably what the repo owner did. Perhaps Github should generate an image instead of using text that can be copied. That way they could help mitigate the copy/paste problem.
This would be an accessibility regression.
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Warnings are vastly less useful than making such activities less dangerous. If you feel something needs get giant flashing warning messages perhaps make it reversible for a week.
I don't know for sure but I think in some jurisdictions "hang on to this data you told me to delete for another week" would be a non-starter.
This would also be much nicer UX. Just click a button to delete something, and it says something like “This has has been moved to Trash, and will be permanently deleted in 30 days”. No big scary warnings needed. And you can still delete it immediately if you want (by emptying your trash afterwards) so it’s not in breach of any laws.
Contrarian opinion here. While things can always be better the Github UX is good enough here. I am reminded of an old phrase: “A bad workman always blames his tools.” At some point you just need to accept responsibility for your actions and stop blaming others.
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> It even makes you type the name More and more IT systems are starting to do this for more and more tasks. I understand why: it's a hell of a lot easier than implementing a trashcan, timed undo, joining in helpful data, etc, but man, one good session with a couple hundred resources that need to be deleted this way is enough to burn you out pretty hard on these. Also, systems that go for these lazy solutions tend als…
When doing such massive changes it may be worthwhile to consider using the API (requires some coding, but still faster then typing in the repo names)
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I did read that part. He or she had to exactly type out "httpie/httpie" to confirm the action. I don't know what else GitHub could do to prevent this. How much handholding does GitHub need to offer? People need to accept the consequences of their own actions. The amount of manual steps necessary to take httpie private is fairly substantial. This person was careless and learned a lesson on being careless.
I don’t see the need for moralizing. They took responsibility, and offered GitHub money to help. They aren’t leaning in heavily to blame Github here. It’s fine to express the gulf of evaluation and execution that led to the error. It happened. There may not be any better known solutions at the moment to lower the risk any further. Calling them careless is also unjustified. They made a mental error processing the info…
It's not like they can just run a few SQL queries on prod and have the author PayPal them 10$.
They need to create a plan, cost estimate, risk assessment, get management/qa/security/SRE/... approvals, write the code, documentation, reviews, tests, run on prod, create invoice, etc. This means 10-20 people work for 1-2 days. I doubt that the author is willing to pay 20000-60000$ for this.
> The problem is that the box looks exactly the same for repos with no commits and stars and for repos with a decade-long history and 55k stargazers and watchers. And it says “Warning: this is a potentially destructive action.” It seems a bit much to expect the website to show you a warning of different levels of severity depending on the stars a repos has, particularly when the standard message is pretty severe and…
I found this article interesting, exactly because "typing the name of the repo you want to make private before proceeding" seemed like a good solution to me as well. (Until now.) However, I can absolutely imagine doing the author's mistake and I think their UI improvement suggestion is great. To me the interface design lesson here is valuable. A recommendation to "check what repo you're in before taking destructive a…
GitHub may be better off preventing a repo with this size of a following from being made private without a support request or something requiring a second party to confirm.
> The problem is that the box looks exactly the same for repos with no commits and stars and for repos with a decade-long history and 55k stargazers and watchers. And it says “Warning: this is a potentially destructive action.” It seems a bit much to expect the website to show you a warning of different levels of severity depending on the stars a repos has, particularly when the standard message is pretty severe and…
Like most computer warnings it was overly generic, it warned there are potential consequences, but never warned of the actual consequences. If the warning had said hey this is going to effect 55K stars and watchers, he would have known he was in the wrong spot.
The problem is if you expect a generic warning then a generic warning doesn't actually warn. A specific warning is more likely to, but not guarantied to catch attention.
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I did read that part. He or she had to exactly type out "httpie/httpie" to confirm the action. I don't know what else GitHub could do to prevent this. How much handholding does GitHub need to offer? People need to accept the consequences of their own actions. The amount of manual steps necessary to take httpie private is fairly substantial. This person was careless and learned a lesson on being careless.
This kind of attitude is how bad products get made.