There's so much focus on the UX here to alert you to a destructive action, but I haven't seen anyone mention this: why does Github even delete stars, and why on earth is it permanent?
It seems like a temporary UX hack put in place because some tricky implementation detail handling stars on private repos. Like they said "we'll fix that later" and then the warning message stayed.
In a well designed system, making a repo public/private would be a switch where full state is retained back and forth.
I mean, it's kinda hypothetical but stars aren't even completely useless in a private repo (for a sufficiently large set of users with access).
I'd go further and say that even the UX around the destructive act of deleting a repo shouldn't be necessary: that seems undo-able. Overwriting would still need a warning (creating a repo in a namespace that previously contained data) as would anything involving losing access (deleting an org, freeing it up to the community at large), but not needing it for repo deletion-a relatively common action-would go a long way toward reducing "autopilot".
It seems like a temporary UX hack put in place because some tricky implementation detail handling stars on private repos. Like they said "we'll fix that later" and then the warning message stayed.
In a well designed system, making a repo public/private would be a switch where full state is retained back and forth.
I mean, it's kinda hypothetical but stars aren't even completely useless in a private repo (for a sufficiently large set of users with access).
I'd go further and say that even the UX around the destructive act of deleting a repo shouldn't be necessary: that seems undo-able. Overwriting would still need a warning (creating a repo in a namespace that previously contained data) as would anything involving losing access (deleting an org, freeing it up to the community at large), but not needing it for repo deletion-a relatively common action-would go a long way toward reducing "autopilot".