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.
Based on your phrasing I’m still not sure if you understand parent—yes, the author had to type “httpie/httpie”, but due to GitHub’s user-level README repo feature, _that specific repo name_ conventionally would be a README repo, which is what the author was trying to delete.
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.
Thank you for this explanation. I didn't know profile READMEs were a thing and have to be named the same as the user account. I can see how this could be confusing when the functionality is different between users and orgs.
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 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.
Honestly, they are blaming Github here. They included a whole "Lessons" section, which are complaints about Github's UI, then database design, then community support. I don't think we should be making fun of them for accidentally privating their repo, but I absolutely laughed at
>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.
> They aren’t leaning in heavily to blame Github here.
> 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.
That's fair, there are two things that rub me the wrong way here. First being how big of a deal they're making about the github equivalent of bookmarks, stars are not a community, period. The more significant thing is that this industry runs on mv foobar foobar truncating foobar with no recourse short of forensics, github's confirmation flow is quite good. Sure it could be improved, but it's so much better than pretty much everything else we have to interact with that assigning responsibility to them for not sounding a klaxon in addition to requiring one to type in the exact name of what's being deleted is absurd.
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.
Where do you see that they didn't accept the consequences of their own actions? They just wish it were different/better.
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.
Just my 2c.. GitHub, instead of the statement "All stars and watchers", can improve it by showing "All 54000 stars and 32000 watchers" will be deleted.
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.
Honestly, no. Your type of attitude is how bad products get made: products that cater to the absolute lowest tech illiterate user. Products that hide and simplify every useful tool to the point of annoyance and disfunction. Github's warnings are plenty enough. It doesn't matter what Github did; this post would still be made, and you people would still be thinking of even more absurd ways to make the user not do something. At a certain point, a tool has to do the function you asked it to do.
As a UX designer, I don’t understand this attitude. Clearly there are things GitHub could do to improve the design here. That doesn’t mean it’s GitHub’s fault, mistakes can always happen.
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.
