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 are enough to get people to think about what they're doing, but this example clearly demonstrates that what's important is to use design not to scare (alone?), but to convey the information which makes a dangerous action dangerous as well. I also really like the fact that when the action isn't dangerous, the distractions ("Type this repo's name", etc) just go away. It's super intuitive, and (for a newbie designer like me) really helps build an intuition for various design principles put in action.

Lesson 2, which was to use soft deletes, is something I have more thoughts about. I assume that the cascading done on GitHub would be done on a FK constraint, but I'm not really sure how you'd do a "cascading soft delete" without making some kind of manual cascading logic? If anyone's aware of a standard way to accomplish this, please do let me know. Of course, the best way may just be to simplify the model so they aren't needed at all haha.

As designers and developers we've been given a chance to sharpen our toolkit. Thanks, HTTPie! You've gained a new star :)

Edit: Changed GitHub couldn't restore to GitHub didn't restore, as pointed out by @ncmncm (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033758#31034195)

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 - the author had to _type out_ the name of the repo they wanted deleted into the warning box. At that point, it's hard to believe the author when they claim that this one addition to the warning UI would have definitely stopped them when they weren't paying enough attention to notice they had typed the entirely wrong repo into the confirmation box.

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.

It's easy to be an armchair engineer and say "well, obviously, don't make this mistake in the future".

As a species, we will always take shortcuts. If a mental pathway doesn't need to be exercised to do something, it won't be. If we see the same popup a hundred times, we're going to ignore the contents by the 100th time because we're used to it.

But it shouldn't be possible to make this mistake if this was designed properly and in a way that made it clear that what you're about to do is actually dangerous and not "dangerous" like the other dozen times you've seen the same message.

A common knee-jerk reaction to "users aren't taking our warnings seriously" is making the warning look more scary and involving more (mechanical) steps – such as two confirmations instead of one. Well, that's pattern matchable and subject to desensitization.

Like the article states, it's more efficient to instead show what you're about to remove, i.e. a summary of the content as opposed to an identifier, then you get both novelty and proportional scariness, depending on how "big" it is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

That said, superlatives like "impossible" aren't realistic here. As long as an action is possible, it is also possible to fuck it up. The challenge screen does require typing in the repo name which is a pretty solid attention-getter. It would be nice to list the important side effects in big angry letters but I'll bet the list of side-effects that are important to some people would be pointlessly long. Maybe a sanity check requiring repos with extremes in certain metrics to get a sanity check from support first— but I have had some preeeeettty protracted response times from GitHub support.

There's many good ways to design this that wouldn't result in pointlessly long lists (which is another problem). You don't need to expose everything that will happen when you do an action, just the "most important".

With unlimited budget, you could compare a bunch of metrics to a baseline to figure out what might be important. Have a lot of stars, way more than the average? That would be nice to highlight. Only have a normal number of forks? Probably less important to highlight that. At the end of the day, Github repos aren't extremely unique. Sure there's probably extremely rare edge cases, but for most repos, comparing against a relatively small number of metrics should get enough to paint a picture of what might get broken. Everything else can be hidden behind a "... and X more" if people are curious.

This both highlights the most important things that might happen, and also provide people with an action to do before confirming, hopefully helping to break the autopilot at the same time.

Also, if you must have I_WANT_CANCER type prompts, try to make them involve expressing what it is that the human is agreeing to, because sometimes it's only at that point the human realises their plan was very stupid. GitHub does that here (you have to type the name of the repo, to delete main_project you'll need to type main_project) but many things do not.

This is why I like Git's force-with-lease. When I try to forcibly overwrite the state, because I know Jim's push was wrong and must be undone, force-with-lease makes me express that, "--force-with-lease=jim-daft-change". And when in fact what I'm going to overwrite is Lisa's urgent bug fix, not Jim's erroneous change, the force-with-lease fails and to get it to apply this way I'd need to say "--force-with-lease=lisa-bug-fix" and that's one last opportunity to say "Wait, what? That's not what I want to do".

- (not intrinsic) many interfaces only give you a few seconds to undo your action, which wouldn't help in this case

- (intrinsic) some events can be layered on top of your change, meaning that you have to either block the undo or reverse all the subsequent events too. This wouldn't be the case for this HTTPie incident, but does prevent UNDO functionality from being a silver bullet.

> "most important"

Yes— the problem is determining the most important metrics for the human who's reading the dialog. Sorting the second part is a lot more difficult than the first.

> With unlimited budget

This framing is only useful to determine what behaviors would be great, not feasibility. We seem to both agree on the ideal behavior but not on the feasibility.

> you could compare a bunch of metrics to a baseline to figure out what might be important.

Important to whom?

> Have a lot of stars, way more than the average? That would be nice to highlight. Only have a normal number of forks? Probably less important to highlight that.

Average for what? Just average for everybody? For the deprecated SlackTextViewController which has vastly higher numbers overall than the unmeasurably more important net-snmp? What about for repos that serve as core functionality to frameworks that only care about forks? XML Schemas that people refer to but never interact with? What about for a company that doesn't care about stars because they're incredibly popular outside of that repo but it's critical for them to monitor the small number of people who've forked their repo?

> Sure there's probably extremely rare edge cases, but for most repos, comparing against a relatively small number of metrics should get enough to paint a picture of what might get broken.

The repo about which you said this mistake should not have been possible was an extremely rare edge case. The article went to great lengths to explore just how fantastically different this repo was. And if you're talking about painting pictures you're using the wrong medium. More information can make the message more pointed but only if it's brief and extremely relevant. If it's not, it's going to reduce the focus on the danger message.

> Everything else can be hidden behind a "... and X more" if people are curious.

Aaaand we come full circle. The whole point of this is to put the metrics most important to that user right in front of their face in bold type because that's going to stop autopilot mistakes. If it's hidden, it failed. Beyond that, the order in which you list things connotes importance— closer to the beginning means more important. Being hidden connotes far lesser importance. If you put the wrong things at the top and the right things behind a click then the autopilot user subconsciously assumes they'd care about the hidden things even less. You're increasing the risk of failure rather than decreasing it. If you're going to highlight anything, you better highlight the right thing.

The existing dialog is pretty clear that you should investigate what it does before you actually execute the command without giving people false clues, and that may be the best compromise. You don't convey false impressions but still convey danger.

> At the end of the day, Github repos aren't extremely unique.

From a quantitative perspective they're not incredibly diverse, even if they're probably more diverse than you imagine. What is immeasurably diverse is the roles those software packages serve, the people who interact with them, and what they need to accomplish their goals. Assuming you can boil that down to a heuristic using available data is something that needs to be concretely proven— not assumed.

It is obviously possible to design a much better, contextual warning with (more) relevant details highlighted. How much time is usually set aside for those?

And yet, it's never going to stop mistakes.

And how many other places like these are there in a large service like GitHub?

A much better way to fix this is to expect mistakes and make it possible to revert instead. Soft deletes can make that trivial to implement for the most part too (except in GDPR like cases where you've got to really remove stuff).

This is not quite correct. In requires inputting the repo name. It's attention-getting the first time. But recently with some colleagues as part of a handoff we went through 50+ repos and archived the irrelevant ones. Very quickly the person doing the actual archiving went from typing to just copy-pasting the repo names. For programmers, copy-pasting from one spot to another can become very mechanical.

So I think this UI choice works well for something that is done very occasionally. But it's no better if people are in the habit. Whereas showing novel information about the cost of the choice would be helpful in breaking the routine. Then could then also make it so that they had to type something only when the operation has a high cost, and what they typed could be something not directly copy-pasteable.

If someone deliberately doing the same thing over-and-over can avoid the manual effort, that's fine. Their frustration would likely make them think about it less. You don't, and shouldn't get prompted to do the same thing using the API, either.

Of course that’s a lot harder to do, since it’s a lot more than a UX change. So I’m not really slagging GitHub here. But it’s the right way to attack this problem.

In this case, I don't quite understand why stars and forks need to be deleted when switching visibility, since it seems like the two shouldn't be linked. I can star and fork my private repos just fine, so it seems like it was just easier to clear it out than to deal with RBAC at that level.

Many people won't notice some of their stars having disappeared, but many would be surprised to see their forks deleted without their consent, especially those that are not merely a mirror. People can have diverged forks after adding substantial changes without feeding them back to the original for a variety of reasons.

Pretend to do it, actually do it 24 hours later, and if they "undo" the delete within that time frame, just remove it from the delete queue process.

I still think you're right, but it's not even as simple as UX and small backend changes. Allowing the repo owner to re-play other peoples' actions comes with complicated policy decisions. GitHub could make it so only support can restore those, but now they're in the awkward position of having to say when it's okay to restore and when it isn't. Still, it may be the best compromise.

It's sort of equally easy to say Github should do X or Y to improve the UX in this (rare?) case without actually knowing the effort or opportunity cost.

Like maybe I'd rather Github figure out how to not have outages so frequently and how to not accidentally give people million+ dollar bills and such.

I doubt the engineers working on the stability issues or billing have anything to do with UX and vice versa. It's not like there's a singular focus that everyone at the company must prioritize above all else. Multiple people can work on multiple projects and not impact one another at all.

On the other, you have a few Microsoft hacks who could easily do the right thing on behalf of those millions of users.

Considering this project was out of ordinary in having 54k stars (article mentions being in top 80), they should not be surprised that their case is not top of mind.

Sure, it would be nice to highlight the most destructive of actions, but they already had to type out full project path as confirmation.

I do believe it would be better if Github allowed restoring data in the next few days (soft deletes ftw) once they hit this issue themselves in the past.

And Github support should have recognized that this project is a special, out of ordinary project, and afforded it some engineering time to restore everything.

Lots and lots of websites and companies use the number of stargazers as a strangely important metric for success, so losing them can be really bad.

- click "change visibility" in the "Danger Zone" area of the settings.

- select "make private" with an additional warning shown that you will lose all stars and watchers. Ok, maybe it should mention how many.

- type the name of the repo into a box and then click "I understand, change repo visibility".

And yes, sometimes it is important to expect humans to not make mistakes. For example, at railway crossings. Even if you drove over it 100 times and no train came, the 101th time you may still die if you don't check for a train before crossing.

For somebody going through a railway crossing, yes, they shouldn't allow themselves to be prone any mistakes there. However, for the people involved in the construction of the railway crossing, they should certainly expect everyone to screw up and scrutinize the safety. We don't want to leave anything affecting livelihoods to chance.

"On average, each year around 400 people in the European Union and over 300 in the United States are killed in level crossing accidents."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_crossing#Safety

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 every year in the United States alone[1]. That doesn't even account for countless cases of abuse, broken families, crime, and other negative effects of alcohol and drugs.

So many people say "oh well it's fine if I do it, I'm responsible" but then at some point someone isn't fine and isn't as responsible as they think they are.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death....

Perhaps that's true for your definition of "better off", which is perfectly fine, but it isn't universal. Even though I don't do drugs, I don't think it should be anyone's business to police what other people do with their minds and their bodies on their own time, as long as they don't pose a threat to anyone else.

One, those substances are fine for a lot of people.

Two, some of those substances are fine for most anybody. I've never even heard of a deadly marijuana overdose, and the evidence shows no increase in mortality for marijuana users.

Three, we already tried alcohol prohibition, and we are currently trying drug prohibition. It does not solve he problem you care about, while creating other large problems.

So really, you sound like somebody who has a personal hobbyhorse and uses pretty much anything (like say, losing stars on GitHub or mentioning a book on airplane safety investigations) to argue for it. And that sort of motivated reasoning around argument for societal change strikes me as way more dangerous than somebody eating a THC edible.

Perhaps if we think more like adults instead of infants we can try to understand complex issues better instead of reinforcing black and white stereotypes of the world or rehashing whatever our favourite source of ignorance tells us.

It may be an even worse drug. People on drugs mostly have some awareness that their ideas aren't very good. But for those drunk on power, the fact that their same great idea has already been tried and led to total disaster is no cause for concern at all. You see, they're obviously smarter and better than the last batch of power-addicts who tried that, so they'll do it right this time. Heaven help us if we ever discovered a chemical intoxicant that was capable of making people that deluded.

Anecdotal: You have to enter the full name for a couple destructive actions on GitHub, and every time I had to do it was so jarring to me that I stopped everything, rechecked what I'm doing twice, started wondering if I might be dreaming, am on drugs or a voice in my head is telling me to do something dumb. Like, yes we should improve nonetheless, and I usually try to put myself into other people's shoes before judging them, but this is just one of the few times where I just can't help but, you know, think it was somewhat dumb to make this mistake with the current system in place. Like, next time we have this stars and watchers warning in place and still someone will manage to proceed on autopilot, what do we do next? Have a siren sound go off in addition? Have the user enable their mic and spell out the repo name? Send a written letter to GitHub? You'll never get the error rate to 0, at which point would you rather accept people making mistakes and calling them out on it than adding more inconvenience on top that just bothers everybody else?

Nothing else on GitHub is like this: orgs and users are treated as the same class of entity pretty much all the time. I could easily see myself making the same mistake on autopilot.

This is applicable to almost any activity: "Sure he was driving drunk, but the car's manufacturer should have prevented that from causing any damage!" I agree that GitHub should improve the design here - privating a '10 star / 1 week old' repo shouldn't be treated the same as privating a '50k star / 10 year old' repo. I don't mean to diminish the fact that GitHub's UI should be improved here.

But the author needs to take some responsibility and realize they were ""driving distracted"", and not act like GitHub is 100% at fault here. Just because GitHub didn't act perfectly doesn't mean the author didn't make any mistakes.

But what you are saying is that marginal effort to prevent mistakes is not worthwhile.

Cars, to take your example, would not be as safe as they are today if they followed the principles you've shown in this post and the grandparent. And yes, even when driving drunk, which is illegal, is safer too - stay in lane, adaptive cruise control, automatic braking, etc. have all incrementally made even extremely ill-advised behaviours safer.

With industrial machines you have to assume people will do the dumbest thing possible. Because someone will find a way to get crushed in a moving part if they can.

You have safety fence after safety fence and regularly test that your lockouts work.

If you don't do all of this and someone dies you can face very harsh legal penalties.

We don't do this with software when the cost of failure is so much lower but we should still understand smart humans will make mistakes.

I mean, it would be disappointing to read it to find it summarizes exactly to what you just said.

At least that is the idea.

The latter needs some kind of consequence in place to offset the benefits from purposefully making said mistakes.

From an individual user's perspective, you still need own your shit and avoid making these mistakes. You can't rely on everything you use having smart safeguards.

There will always be dumb/careless users that a product should consider. There will always be suboptimal UI (we could've just as easily been talking about CLI database tools) that a user should watch out for

If every system we're interacting daily should be fool-proof, it will requires enormous time and effort. Naturally, we invests more time and effort when it's about life and death situation. If we only lose 2 cents by our mistake, we just don't care.

Of course, I'd like to have more fool-proof design in all the destructive interactions from all websites. But, the question is, does it worth it?

https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...

The wages of sin is death.

I don't know. Github employees themselves have made this mistake as outlined in the post, and they were easily able to recover from it, which probably lowered the priority on changing any UX.

Essentially, it's a complete non-issue depending on whether Github cares about you.

Would you like the police in your area to behave in this manner? I think not.

> Sadly we can't easily do that without triggering lots of issue. We tried with a couple of projects in the past and found it caused a bunch of bad things to happen.

https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/149333028949351629...

On the other hand, you should really, really, really hope that GitHub has internal guardrails to prevent their engineers making cowboy edits to the production databases without manager approval.

Obviously it would be nice to see A similar response from GitHub regardless of whether the issue at hand is affecting themselves versus a member of their community. But, as long as humans are making the decisions, that’s probably a pipe dream. And honestly, policing could very well be the standard example of this.

First of all, this is self-evident. But second of all and more importantly: it doesn’t scale.

The reason we have blame-free postmortems is because people will always make mistakes, so we find ways to change process or design to minimize those mistakes.

If you think you’ll never do something on autopilot, you’re fooling yourself.

The author also neglects to mention he had to type the full project name into a dialog box, which would be critical to any real postmortem. If typing the repo name into GitHub didn’t wake him up, why should we believe listing the number of stars would? The author said he thought he was in a different repo, but that makes no sense.

The real lesson, imo, is for people obsessed with stars to set up permissions, use dedicated accounts, and not toy around with settings you know are dangerous before you’ve had your coffee.

That’s a lot more reasonable than GitHub spending time to implement yet another warning box feature that the author has proved they can ignore regardless of how obvious GitHub makes it.

Please, quote from the article where you read this. I don't see it.

In the article I read, the author admits fault:

> I accidentally made the project’s repository private for a moment.

The author goes on to explain how they made the mistake.

> What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.

> GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. In this context, and since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, my brain switched to auto-pilot mode.

> I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.

> That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.

The author does not attempt to hide or misrepresent the GitHub UI that requires confirmation. They show it for both "httpie/httpie" and "httpie/.github".

It does not matter that you have to type the repo name, because once you are on auto-pilot, you proceed past this step. In fact, the author doesn't admit it, but if he's like me, I'll bet they copy/pasted the name. Because the name alone is not sufficient.

The author then goes on to suggest what might have kicked him out of auto-pilot. Providing more information about the repo other than just its name. The name alone is NOT sufficient. And they author shows some example UIs from their own software.

Your suggestion: "The real lesson, imo, is for people obsessed with stars to set up permissions, use dedicated accounts, and not toy around with settings you know are dangerous before you’ve had your coffee."

This simply does not scale. It would require everyone to learn the same lesson for themselves.

I've been a sys admin and developer for over 25 years. People make mistakes. They make them all the time. Putting context-free (or minimal context in the case of the GitHub UI) "Are you sure?" dialogs in front of them does nothing to prevent mistakes.

All the author is asking for is a bit more context from the GitHub UI to help the user realize the significance of their action. This would help future GitHub users to avoid the same error.

It's quite amusing to read this so soon after.

To make a better system for every human, you can either try changing all the humans, or you can change the system that is supposed to serve them. One is easier than the other.

I would also say that post does not come across to me as he is only blaming GitHub.

A prompt that pops up to warn you that you're doing something potentially dangerous, when you know that what you're doing is benign, is a prompt that's crying wolf. You'll learn to tune it out.

A well-intentioned PM then thought the fix was to alias rm and add prompts to confirm. They had a whole project to add this alias everywhere.

First it broke existing scripts all over the place. So they fixed them to auto apply the confirmation.

Cut to a few months later and someone rm-rf’d something again, ignoring the prompt (or maybe auto applying it).

So the PM wanted a better message and a second prompt.

People are well intentioned but I’ve seen this path of stupidity that doesn’t solve the problem but is an activity in response to a problem.

When it comes to repetitive or familiar actions, this is physically impossible. If a repeated action is dangerous you cannot use a human interrupting themselves as your only control. It just won't happen.

Overall this is a classic UI design failure. In addition to the "people physically can't take themselves off autopilot" problem, the interface destroys the user's data without providing a way to get it back. It would take relatively little engineering effort to make this reversible.

When I administered many VAX / UNIX machines waaay back, the terminals were all configured to be 'special' for the super user. It would have been HORRIFICALLY BAD if any command were executed unknowingly.

GH does -not- distinguish for project sizes, so there is NO SUPPORT for its users in this way. Every feature is to be considered with the same "shotgun severity".

I would say that makes things even worse. Because it's just training you to rely on -i/I as a sensible default. One day, you'll encounter that one distro that doesn't have that, and it'll be the time where you really wish it were.

An option that shows a y/n action. That's what GitHub does when you're about to make private/delete a repo (even more asking you to type out its entire name) and yet here we're.

Tbh, when I've deleted repo's, I've mostly just copied the repo name and pasted it in the box. Careless of me? Definitely. Can GitHub change that carelessness? Probably not. Will a box that says "Stars: 54k" help? I think it'd help me, at the very least.

    [ ] Delete 54,000 stars?
    [ ] Delete 8,000 watchers?
    [ ] etc

There’s also an issue of taking a repo private, making changes when no one gets alerted, and making it public to make it harder for people to know what’s going on.

They could always notify watchers about the repo being made private.

"Just don't make any mistakes" is the worst stance one can have in this context, it denies reality and only assures you're unprepared when (not if) something important goes wrong.

If they're in autopilot, how are they going to "make sure"?

Everyone has been in this spot several times. Those who didn't are just lucky.

There's got to be external contingencies to protect people when they're in autopilot.

Mistakes happen. It's better to have a really good Undo than a lot of confirmation dialogs.

What’s the star threshold? 1000? 5?

I’d hate to now have to type in the number of watchers and stars as part of the private/delete/move/etc prompt for all the times I know what I’m doing.

It’s a balance between punishing the non-stupid users vs protecting the stupid users. And people switch between these categories. I might be non-stupid today and stupid tomorrow.

That... isn't how "autopilot" (or humans in general) work(s).

I mean this isn't exactly how it works. But it's a bit scary.

Thing is, we type all day, and can type pretty much any string at a decent speed without putting much thought into it.

Any of us must have mistakenly typed a full file path or API URL, just to realize it’s not the right machine or project after having typed it all. It just take 2 or 3s max after all.

I think it becomes an arms race to get attention on important things, we can do better by focusing more on every single destructive operation. We can also avoid having too similar interfaces for completely different contexts.

In this particular case the stars would have been a useful clue, but in the majority of similar cases the wouldn't be any stars. It would be a useless and redundant signal.

Where does it say that they deleted any repo?

Humans will be humans, we can't help it.

Structures or systems that handle large amounts of user interactions should predict such use cases and design accordingly. a.k.a make them "idiot proof".

I copy/paste the repo name every time I delete a repo on GitHub. Yeah, it’s still a minor impediment, but it’s definitely not “TYPE the account and repo name.”

Humans err.

Have the advertisements/sign-up/GDPR pop-ups trained us to 'engage autopilot to dismiss the pop-up' as soon as possible irrespective of its importance?

"Are you sure you want to disconnect the server? No / Yes"

Click remove presents you with the following dialog box:

"Are you sure you want to remove the server? No / Yes"

Good luck! I mean, it's not a super huge deal to recreate the server entry, but still annoying when you're in the middle of something and just realized what you did.

Honestly, just replacing the "Yes" button with the action being taken would be enough to improve this. "No / Disconnect" and "No / Remove". But my personal opinion is that disconnecting is not a destructive action unless there's an open transaction or running query. So the dialog box should be contextual on that scenario, and otherwise it should just disconnect.

"Disconnecting will cancel executing queries and rollback open transactions. Continue? No / Disconnect"

Or the lazy web dialog popup with "Cancel" and "OK".

So you click on "Cancel Glorping The Frobnitz" and up pops a dialog with "Cancel" and "OK". It always takes a moments thought does the "Cancel" on the popup mean cancel the cancel glorping or cancel the cancel.

Since it takes literally seconds to change the button captions it might be nice to think of something clearer. Seconds if you're a UI expert which I'm not. Of course the webdev part of changing the captions on the page really would be seconds for me to do.

Typing error, it should be

> mean cancel the glorping or cancel the cancel.

Also, writing a solid blog post about a customer-service corner case and getting it to the top of news.ycombinator can be a great, if somewhat last-ditch, opportunity to escalate a problem.

In a way, I think warnings and undo serve two different functions-warnings are meant to inform the user of their action, and undos are meant to roll back actions taken.

Undo-instead-of-warning is a great pattern for lower-stakes actions that are easy to undo and cause minimal damage if left done. This allows the few warnings you do show to be recognized as truly important.

There could be separate buttons, "Delete all my stars", "Delete all my watches".

Of course it does. You can’t watch/star a private repo unless you have access, so all watchers/starrers should be removed. If you kept the data as-is watchers would still see the repo updates in their feed, which is the opposite of the 'private' feature promise.

Perhaps the delete action is not accomplished right away and a column is checked. Then after a X amount of months a worker process goes around actually deleting things?

If it is needful to be able to delete stars, make a separate button for that. But it is hard to imagine such a need.

This logic should be purely in the DB model or very close to it. In any case the internal API should never ever list private repos of an organization a user isn't a member of, period. Stars or no stars. Follows or no follows. Why should it? There's no corner case here, if stars pose a problem, the problem isn't the stars, it's a defective model behind. Hiding things that aren't meant to be seen in the UI means putting business logic in the UI. Just don't.

Ideally, moving the entire serialized record to an archive table keeps things as clean as possible.

OTOH, I haven't been in such a mode, so I really got no right to comment on this. Best wishes to the team -- that those who saw his post will restar/rewatch the repo -- and (fwiw) thanks for writing it up and making me even more paranoid (in a positive sense) about doing such destructive operations.

GitHub doesn’t use foreign keys, the cascade delete must have been manually implemented.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21486494

Yet there are many architectures beside MVC. Many of them decades old. Proven. Established. Yet unknown to devs who picked up a rails book on day 1 and never looked back (I've been guilty of that for years).

This particular problem is a textbook candidate for Command Pattern. The problem of undo is solved naturally in any event-sourced setup (git is even sourced, and moving through history a prime feature). Probably more architectures that I'm less familiar with, solve 'undo' as well.

But we are stuck with the web, backends in 2022, being built on MVC frameworks like Rails, where solving such issues is tough and complex. So we are stuck with a huge amount of warning dialogs to 'solve' this.

Point being: choose your architecture well, based on your needs and the tradeoffs. Don't just grab the next fancy framework, because that will decide for you, if, and how you solve things like 'soft delete' or 'undo'.

This comment seems to be down on MVC and Rails so I was curious about the alternatives you mentioned and came across your post that ended with praise of Rails ( https://berk.es/2022/03/08/the-waning-of-ruby-and-rails/ ):

> Rails still is a great way to get a prototype demo, or minimum viable product online in days with least surprises.

Your comment seems to indicate that you started discovering new architectures like the Command Pattern but it sounds like you are also still a proponent of Rails and MVC based on your blog post. Do you have any links to resources that helped you discover other patterns or could you share what took you on your journey?

In the Rails blog post, you said:

> I have a separate post planned on "RAD web frameworks", MVC and ActiveRecord, but it is safe to say that such frameworks, amongst which Rails, have found their niche, yet are by no means a silver bullet.

Is that post you are planning to write going to delve into some of the architectures you mentioned here? That would definitely be something I would be interested in reading.

He has a great article (2014), old, on why you may not want to build that framework at all[2] too:

> Using a framework requires a significant commitment. By accepting the framework into your code, you surrender your control over the details that the framework manages. [...] > And yet despite the huge commitment you’ve made to the framework, the framework has made no reciprocal commitment to you at all. That framework is free to evolve in any direction that pleases its author.

Another great source are the books, and/or youtube channel by Dave Farley[3]

What set me on a journey is -decades ago- the pain I, as a developer felt when developing web-applications for my clients. But worse: the pain they felt for getting delivered crap. "Why am I delivering crap" was the question that set me to research frameworks, languages, design patterns and architecture. Drupal, Rails, Django, ASP: I've worked with it, and delivered crap with it.

In general, I found that a framework matters. e.g. the simple act of reading ActiveRecord Critisism on wikipedia[4] got me thingking:

> also due to the strong coupling of database interaction and application logic,

This was true for project D, G and Y! This was why we failed to iterate at any speed at all. Because I can relate it immediate to Real And Actual Problems, Failed Projects, Slipped Deadlines, Burned out colleagues, and so on, all of wich I encountered during my career. Not saying all those problems were caused by ActiveRecord or Rails! But that they were caused by the choice for the wrong framework. Or the choice for a framework at all.

It led me to DDD[5], which then is the gateway into all sorts of Enterprise Patterns. I dislike that name, because the connotation is all wrong. Especially the subtitle of the canonical book on DDD struck a note:

> Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

This! This is why I'm delivering crap: I fail to tackle the complexity that inherit in any domain. In e.g. Rails, I would just spread it all over the place, fighting against ActiveRecord and Rails, yet still failing to isolate, modularize and capture that domain.

So I no longer use Rails, nor any framework in my startup. I occasionally do some freelance gigs, often Rails. And the more I learned how to Tackle Complexity in the Heart of Software through choices and tradeoffs, the more I see why a project in Rails that I'm flewn in to salvage, is doomed. It's the choice for Rails. Not lacking of services, not "Fat Models", not "missing tests" nor missing of any sort of "rigorous refactoring" Its Rails! Rails is just unfit for this domain, this problem, this customer.

Yet Rails shines for others: I restate: It's brilliant for simple CRUD. But anything you expect to have any sort of "Complexity in the heart" is probably unfit.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCfqyGl3nq_V0bo64CjZh8g

[2] https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/05/11/FrameworkBo...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCfqyGl3nq_V0bo64CjZh8g (his books are promoted on this channel)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_record_pattern#Criticis...

[5] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DomainDrivenDesign.html

It will apply to all queries unless you specifically call " unscoped"

2. Like the article suggests, additional UX improvements could be made besides making it possible to restore a backup or providing an undo action.

3. I feel you are ignoring the fact that technology-wise it was probably Rails along with its MVC model that got them into their scale in the first place.

4. Had they focused on a more exotic architecture from day one, the UX of other features on the site could've been significantly worse.

I don't know the internals of Github. But we had soft-delete dragging down our database. Indexing, for one, becomes tough.

It also presumes everything lives in a single, canonical, transactional database. In real life, anything of scale, with legacy lives in multiple services. There'll be caches, search-indexes (elastic etc), data-lakes, leader/follower clusters and whatnot. Propagating a "delete" command is no easier or harder in such a setup, than propagating a "flag" which has severe business and security implications.

2. Like the article suggests, additional UX improvements could be made besides making it possible to restore a backup or providing an undo action.

Yup. My point was that with e.g. Event-sourced or Command pattern, you don't even need that whole UI in the first place. There could be a 20 minute "undo" somewhere. Or an "undo" that remains active untill another non-compatible command renders undoing unavailable. This is a common pattern. Which was invented decades ago, and is still used everywhere to solve this exact problem.

Why invent dialogs, soft-deletes, etc, when the problem is solved, done and non-existent, given you make the right choices? Why do software engineers insist on re-inventing wheels every few years rather than grab existing, proven and solid solutions for this?¹

3. I feel you are ignoring the fact that technology-wise it was probably Rails along with its MVC model that got them into their scale in the first place.

Why do you feel this? Rails comes with tradeoffs. I'm not saying "rails was a bad choice" But I'm saying "the choice for Rails brings the tradeoffs that e.g. Undo is hard".

Saying that "it is easy in Rails" is both disingenuous and unfair: there are hundreds of Gems, some of which grown to enormous project almost the size of entire ActiveRecord itself, to tackle these problems: it isn't easy. Papertrail, for example is a magnificent monster. "just drop in papertrail" really is not a solution, it's a problem.

> 4. Had they focused on a more exotic architecture from day one, the UX of other features on the site could've been significantly worse.

I.e. "tradeoffs".

¹ The answer, I'm afraid, is a mix of the doubling-of-developers-every-four-years (forever september), NIH, and unwillingness to invest time in learning the foundations layed out in the past decades. The last is what bothers me most.

For one thing, because it works very well and is much easier to wrap your head around than the command pattern (much less undoing a command, and keeping track of which commands make incompatible changes).

These things are worth the effort if you are going to build an app that will be around for ten years and serve an existing market. Much harder to justify if you are still figuring out what you actually need to do.

Like, I agree with you that most developers just don’t know about it yet, and therefore don’t use it, but that’s also a factor of MVC just being the right choice for 90% of all apps, and easier to get started with.

There is nothing about Rails or MVC preventing someone from doing this. This is a very common design principle for all kind of ERP and BPM systems: don't ever delete anything.

DIY in this case really is very simple. And far more flexible, performant even, and future-proof.

(I've worked on a project where two full-time devs spent days upgrading this gem; this is over 6 years ago). And a few months ago, I worked on a project where they had more code to configure, patch and work around paranoia, than any DIY ever did. My even simpler DIY version not only used 50% of the code we had to override the gem before, it allowed for some custom work that we could not do before.

And no: even DIY ain't as simple as you make it seem. Practical issue, that I encountered last year even, was where their "soft delete" was making state-machines very tough. Because in a FSM, "deleted" wants to be state, like anything else. But the "generic soft-delete" conflicts with that. So the project had both. And some fugly glue-code to sync between the FSM and the soft-delete and vice-versa. No suprise that this broke occasionally, making data re-available that people thought gone.

I'm not at a terminal, so I can't check it out, but could you make a compound foreign key with the soft delete column and use the on update cascade? Something like `alter table stars add foreign key (repo_id, is_deleted) references repos (id, is_deleted) on update cascade;`

What an odd turn of phrase.

What's the value in capitulating to that? Also, a user saying "delete this stuff" is a pretty practical reason to do so.

Indifference != contempt.

i mean, this is the company that perfected the "throw it all away and start over" serviceability paradigm and the "we don't know what's wrong with it just reboot it every six hours" reliability paradigm for systems.

totally reliable business partner to trust for outsourcing critical business and government infrastructure for sure!

those who are serious and prudent seek assurance, for the reckless and feckless, there's azurance.

if the blog post doesn't work, i'd suggest renaming the project (specifically the cli) such that it makes reference to the hollowness of the new microsoft's apparent love for open source. that way when those thousands of developers (who happen the be of the exact variety that the dinosaur is trying to court) are invoking it every day, it can burn into their skulls to never ever work for, or choose technologies made by, microsoft.

score 5: funny, insightful

Couldn't you just use an on delete trigger for this? I have no experience one the subject however

Some databases also support INSTEAD OF triggers.

GitHub (Microsoft) had a non intuitive UI feature, they themselves were victim of. They restored for their own repo but not for the customer repo...Zero customer focus is the lesson here.

"...In our case, however, they refuse to do that, citing undesirable side effects and the cost of resources. We even offered GitHub financial compensation for any resources required. But, sadly, they declined. They have other priorities than resurrecting the community of one of the oldest and most popular community projects on their platform..."

"...So the answer to the question is, unfortunately, the following: GitHub will restore a repo damaged by making it private. But only if it’s one of their own projects, not a community one.."

This would entirely depend upon how often it shows up. The more often it shows up when the scare isn't relevant, the less people will pay attention to it.

>the distractions ("Type this repo's name", etc) just go away

I think it shows that what one types needs to be relevant information. In this case, due to the similarity between when the author would've been asked if they did what they were intending to do and what they typed to do what they actually did, we can judge the prompt isn't enough. If this also asked you to type in the number of git stars you were about to lose, that would've been enough to make author recheck exactly what they were doing.

The number of games that DO ask this question, immediately after saving, is ridiculously high it's so frustrating.

Relying on database cascade deletions is very dangerous. Especially since as the application/org grows, it's easy to lose track of all the things that may get cascaded. There's a good chance you'll find yourself having cascade-deleted data that you never intended to have deleted.

Manually implementing logic for "when archiving X, also archive Y and Z" takes more effort, but is a lot safer. When it comes to data.

What surprised me most is that github performs irreversible deletions when someone making a repository private. I would have expected them to just create a "is_deleted" column and set that flag to true. I wonder how much of this behavior is motivated by GDPR. Ie, complying with it requires completely deleting data when requested by the user, and they decided the most straight forward way to comply with that requirement is to delete the data immediately when requested.

<dialog-text>

If they click ok:

Asking again to be sure you want to destroy masses of data

<dialog-text>

But even that fails if there is a language barrier.

Surely GitHub is localized? (and if not, why the hell not?)

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 explicit. It even makes you type the name of the repo you want to make private before proceeding - I don't see how that wouldn't make anyone snap out of autopilot. I sympathise with the author's misfortune but it is pretty hard to look at that warning dialog and conclude that he was not sufficiently warned of the consequences or given a chance to reflect.

I find it disappointing that all of the lessons supposedly learned from this ordeal are lessons for other people, not the author. Surely lesson #1 should have been "check what repo you're in before taking destructive actions".

  > […] I obviously had no intention to make httpie/httpie private. So, why then?
  >
  > The proximate cause was that I thought I was inside a different repo; […] What I actually intended to do was to hide the HTTPie organization’s profile README, […]
  >
  > What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.
  >
  > GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. […] since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, […]
  >
  > I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.
  > 
  > That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.

For example, my README repo is and must be called “glacials/glacials”; if I wanted to delete it that is what I would type, but if I were an organization and wanted to delete it, I would type something else. This different behavior between acting as a user vs. acting as an organization is what caught the author off-guard. They typed “httpie/httpie” and consciously thought “yes, I want to delete the README repo, which I know must have name httpie/httpie, so that’s definitely what I’d like to do, I’ll go ahead and type that”.

This is not absentmindedness, it is a misleading product inconsistency. Were it not for this, I would 100% agree with you.

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 information. Whenever humans are involved there is a risk of illogical and bizarre mental errors in decision making because we are degenerating meat robots granted full agency.

Shit happens. How we emotionally deal with it is the test of life as a human being.

>The dialog should be more contextual and, paraphrasing again, it should say “You’re about to kill 55,000 people.” That would’ve certainly made me pause.

> Honestly, they are blaming Github here.

I think both of these statements can be true at the same time. They are taking much of the responsibility while also explaining how some aspects of Github's design are partly responsible for the outcome.

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.

> That humble tool, which we open-sourced, quickly captured developers’ hearts and rapidly became one of the top projects on GitHub.

> We’ve raised a Seed Round ...

It's not hard to believe the seed round and the entire pitch of the commercial venture was tied to the star count, and it's not hard to believe that the author would drop $1/star to restore the count.

There's no harm in that, and Github being used by millions of developers is a strong reason to make it just a little bit safer for even the rarer cases like these.

The article describes exactly what else they could do, including example screenshots from another app that does it.

This screen gives you pretty poor context for your action. You can’t so easily see things that normally tell you at a glance where you are. They also don’t offer a good preview of the action, or undo, which is how you normally make potentially destructive actions less dangerous. Instead they made a scary prompt, but since they use that solution a lot, users may get desensitized to it.

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 actions" has zero value, since everyone knows that already.

---

Completely agreed on the second point though, it's weird to blame this mainly on GitHub.

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.

Surely there are multiple solutions, but I think you distilled the essence well: make the truly dangerous action different to the learned repetition.

Now I'm wondering whether this approach actually works.

[0] - https://youtu.be/9LmdUz3rOQU?t=66

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 also to go for the lazy solution of "just delete and recreate the resource" instead of implementing proper modify functionality. This compounds the problem. As if administrative tasks didn't already come with enough drudgery, now you have to constantly do the old timey school punishment of writing lines just to do your job.

"Just add friction" is evil. Easy, but evil.

As time went by they slowly started to “improve” the situation by constantly forcing you to click through a “changing this setting may have knock on effects to your system” banner…that they showed every time you changed anything. Making it completely useless for actually preventing you from harming your system and really just giving the impression they were trying to cover their butts legally.

I hated working with that platform.

If you're using Github's CLI tool, you can autoconfirm repo deletion so that you won't have to type the name ever again. It seems like if Github were to change their UI, they would need to somehow change their API as well.

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.

If you feel something needs get giant flashing warning messages perhaps make it reversible for a week.

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.

I've done this for personal projects. I don't see why GitHub can't do something similar.

> It even makes you type the name of the repo you want to make private before proceeding

No, it literally does not. Nor does this mean you fully understand the implications of what you are doing as explained in the article.

> check what repo you're in before taking destructive actions

The amount of checking and automation of things for non-destructive actions, you'll forgive someone for expecting a bit of extra automation that, in this case, literally costs less.

Also I believe that asking us every day the ridiculously braindead act, to copy a text from here to there is more harmful than it helps, it just sets people to autopilot mode. Although I don't have any measures.

On one hand, there's a UI change GitHub could implement that would greatly prevent this situation from happening again. On the other hand, one could try warn every github users that this situation can happen and to be carefull... Well I have my opinion on which would be most effective.

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?

- 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 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.

- The users can see all their stars, but the private ones lead to a 404, which would be perplexing for a greater number of people than the current behavior.

- All private repos that have been public at least once lead to a "this repo is now private" message, that would in practice allow anyone to make an index of all the private repos that were public at least once. And it would also allow anyone to know when a private repo that was private at least once is deleted.

I think the current behaviour is better than all of these options.

And there's always the potential to add a other toggle when privating a repo that lets you force-remove all stars.

Sorta like most social media apps when you want to delete your account. It doesn't delete it fully until a month later

Why seeing a start you made for a previously public repository makes it not private? People remember things too, there's also the webarchive. You should be able to unstar it or keep your star, the only difference is that you don't know if the repository still exists or not.

If an admin were to private->delete, then all the stars referencing the report would stay and thus the reference to the repo would still be there, on GitHub's servers. There's a difference between GitHub storing things forever and third parties on the internet being a forever archive of visible pages.

Current behavior is destructive.

>- All private repos that have been public at least once lead to a "this repo is now private" message, that would in practice allow anyone to make an index of all the private repos that were public at least once. And it would also allow anyone to know when a private repo that was private at least once is deleted.

This is a much better option.

When someone deactivates their account, you can see that you have X additional likes, but you can't access them. If that user reactivates their account, those likes suddenly show back up.

This could be a privacy issue if you've decided to remove likes for a certain categories of posts for whatever reason.

For GitHub, a couple other options I can think of would be to 1. show stars for private repos but only for the purpose of unstarring or 2. hide stars when a repo goes private and then give users an option to re-enable their star if a repo goes back to public. But these options are relatively complex, and I can see why GitHub would go with deletion.

Sounds fine and expected to me.

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?

Here's a list of your favourite songs, but two are missing, have fun figuring out which two it is!