> You'd just have a dashboard full of invites instead of a dashboard full of add notices.

I don't participate on github so I did't think you'd just stuff all of those notices on the dashboard. That sounds like a pretty broken UI IMHO.

> But remember that Undo > Confirmation. Always.

That's your opinion and it's very clear from this thread that a significant number of people strongly disagree with it. I will concede that Undo in this context has much less friction, likely for most github users. I wouldn't necessarily agree that it's better and certainly not always.

I would argue that in almost all cases, a confirmation is far inferior to undo from a usability standpoint.

I must admit to having been persuaded by Aza Raskin, in his widely-read article "Never Use a Warning When You Mean Undo".

[0] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/neveruseawarning

It depends on the context. In the last two years I've worked on apps where undo would mean incurring liability or potentially losing money immediately following a change. In the first example where liability would be incurred allowing the user to undo a change would actually mean that two changes were made and both have to be tracked, with full audit trail etc. By prompting users for confirmation you have an opportunity to ensure that the user understands the consequences of their decisions. That may not matter for adding a contributor to a github project but it does when changing a federal form or legal document for example.

So in this case, you're not talking about making the software easier to use, you're talking about about making a cleaner legal audit trail. Which I'll still argue makes the application in question harder to use and is a worse software choice.

But a worse interface that makes the software easier to code is one thing; a worse interface that makes the software more easily comply with the law is an entirely different trade-off.

> you're talking about about making a cleaner legal audit trail.

Not exactly, the legal audit trail can be messy and it doesn't matter one bit so long as it's accurate. In the case described change one is logged and the undo constitues a second change which is also logged. Change one incurs liability for the user and change two simply increases the liability for the user (sorry I can't go into specifics) even though it's correcting a problem. In my experience it's very difficult to create a user interface where the "undo" action clearly indicates the consequence of the change in these scenarios. Preventing unnecessary changes via a combination of up front documentation and confirmation provided the better user experience, and legal liability reduction, in my experience and based on some user feedback.

> But a worse interface that makes the software easier to code is one thing; a worse interface that makes the software more easily comply with the law is an entirely different trade-off.

Believe me, not confirming user actions would have been less code and easier to build and maintain in this case. Legal compliance on my part would have been maintained in either case. Allowing my users to quickly and easily build up liability would be doing them a disservice however. Adding some friction to those transactions was agreed to be the better option by everyone involved.

I think the idea that confirmation vs undo is subjective. We can go on and on for hours and come up with examples and counter examples. The particular context of the action likely determines which provides the better user experience in total (not just on that one screen or interaction but via the consequences of the action as well). I would certainly prefer that if I'm using a system like facebook that it confirm I really want to make my home address and phone number public before it does so rather than letting me check a box and it's done. The same goes with a money transfer where an undo may not even be possible after some amount of time. Not prompting for confirmation certainly makes the transactions move faster (less friction) and undo is easy enough in many cases, but does that frictionless transaction have the best outcome for my users? Not always. The blanket statement that "undo > confirmation. Always." is just plain wrong, not that you made it of course.

Given the choice between a private dashboard vs a public repo list being spammed, I'll take the former, any day. I don't want either, but the former is an annoyance to me and only me. The latter is something that can (potentially) give a bad impression of me to others.

Remember that reputation is important. Always.

I'm not sure how many times I have to say it: Adding someone as a collaborator is not publicly visible until you collaborate (make commits) on the project. At that point we show the activity on your public profile.

>I'm not sure how many times I have to say it:

How long until you get clued in that maybe the problem is not with the end users but with your UI?

This is, however, kind of counterintuitive for most people. Principle-of-least-surprise suggests you could do something about this; split the dashboard, say, into projects you participate in (indicated by having committed) and projects you've been invited to. You don't need the separate approval step there, so the workflow's the same, but it'd feel much more obvious.

Also; with the "professionals" thing - I totally get what you mean, and it's abundantly clear you guys are doing things for the right reasons, but the tone kind of jarred with me a little bit there. Nothing drastic, but I'm a person first, a professional second...

In a different thread jmaygarden said:

I got "dong markup" in my RSS reader from pull requests to zedshaw/mongrel2 today. So, the trolling was very much in public view.

So, there are ways to publicly troll someone on GitHub, even if not in this precise way.

Up until just now, I didn't know that. And if you didn't reply to my comment just now, I still wouldn't know it.

And you explicitly telling people about how being a collaborator works isn't a scalable way for people to find out. And it sounds like this question/issue has come up before. Perhaps it can be made clearer somehow?

In any case, thanks for clarifying when you become visible as a collaborator, even if only in this one comment to me.

Your comment [1] is a direct reply to one where kneath explicitly states it [2].

    [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2606063
    [2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605804

For me, it was pretty obvious because it doesn't show up on the profile under 'Public Repositories', only on the dashboard in a list of projects you have access to.

I think he means making it clearer in the UI. It would be weird for Github to depend on HN to inform users.

The thing is that this is amazingly rare. The handful of times it's happened, the 'victim' most likely just removes the repo (which has always been possible) and that's the end of it. Others might say to their friends on IRC "Hey, can you see dongml in my projects list on github?" and sure enough the answer will be 'no'.

It's easy to say "oh just add it to the UI", but to actually do it is another story. Before you know it you've got hundreds of preferences, and then people will be complaining that there's too many options and it's too confusing (a-la facebook privacy settings). Honestly, GitHub's preference pages already need some work, so I for one am glad they don't add drop downs for every person's pet feature.

Regardless, it doesn't matter now. Now you just remove the project and block the user (or, presumably, just blocking the user might remove the repo... either way), so that's that.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I mean making it more clear in the UI that there's a separation between projects where you're a committer, and where you're just invited (to use another poster's words). If an (apparently) Github employee feels the need to wonder how often he's going to have to explain it, it seems that there exists a common confusion in the distinction.

Yea sorry I tangent-ed a bit there. Probably because I just think this is a non-issue. It's in the UI in that it's listed in your repositories you have access to, but not on your profile. I don't see what kind of UI change they could make that would make it clearer short of text or a tooltip or something, and I think that the %0.001 of users who would ever care is just not worth the time to even considering it. The reason kneath was wondering how many times he had to say it is because it's all over this thread -- including the direct parent of the asker in this case.