953978 - Provide a way to undo deleting an account

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Instantbird Graveyard :: Other, enhancement)

Description

[Benedikt Pfeifer]

*** Original post on bio 540 at 2010-10-12 11:58:00 UTC ***

I just read an article [1] by Aza Raskin about the "power of undo" and its logic seems very reasonable.

It can be summed up as "people might ignore warnings out of habit, so give them the choice to undo mistakes".

This could for example be applied to the account manager where a deleted account could be shown as "Account ABC was removed. [It's ok] [Undo]" maybe in a way like "This extension will be removed after restart [Restart] [Undo]" on the new addons manager.

Apply where applicable?


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

Comment 1

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 540 at 2010-10-12 14:02:21 UTC ***

Nice topic! I've already spent some time thinking about this. There are some actions that are possible to undo (closing a conversation, renaming a contact, moving a contact, (in the near future:) merging/detaching contacts/buddies). For these, it's just a matter of motivation to make the "Undo" command work. Currently these are not undoable, but don't display a warning either.

The problem gets interesting for actions for which undo is not possible:
 - removing a buddy from the buddy list (on protocols that require you to be authorized to get the presence information for the buddy, you cannot re-add the contact without re-requesting authorization and annoying your contacts)
 - removing logs. Once the data has been erased, it's too late to get it back.
 - forget a person (in the future we may have a feature to automatically remove all data that shows an interaction happened with a person. This would be for the "oops, this is a friend, I should have added it on my work profile/account/computer" use case. You can of course imagine variations based on a wife and the family computer...).
Those are the kind of actions for which we display (or would display) a confirmation dialog, which is likely to be ignored, and will certainly bother the users whether it is ignored or not.

One idea I had to fix that was to postpone the real action. For example, instead of saying "This action cannot be canceled, are you sure you want to destroy all your data?", the dialog would say "Once performed, this action cannot be canceled. Instantbird will delay it by a few minutes (an hour?) so as to save you some stress if you ever happen to do it on the wrong buddy.". As the message is no longer so important, we can replace the "Do not show next time" checkbox by "Show this warning again next time". It's a message that needs to be read once, not every time.
Such an action would typically be queued in the undo stack, and be performed an hour later, or when Instantbird is cleanly closed. We could add somewhere a "Perform all pending operations" menu item so that users who are really in a rush to get their profiled cleaned up before [whoever] comes back can still do it.
This is not trivial to implement and the UI needs to be carefully polished if we want to have this perceived as something useful rather than a PITA.


Changing one's twitter status may also me an action to delay, but by a few seconds only (5-10 seconds might by good). It's so frequent in IM clients that integrate twitter (Adium for example) to type in the wrong window and send as a public status something that was intended to be private...

Comment 2

[Benedikt Pfeifer]

Attachment: Example (mockup) for a case where much space is available (account manager)

*** Original post on bio 540 as attmnt 369 at 2010-10-12 18:48:00 UTC ***

This mockup shows what could happen if the UI offers much space. There would be a text saying what happened "[Account] has been removed", as well as the icon clearifying which service was meant.

An "Undo" link would offer the same option as there is on the addon manager when an extension has been removed.

Importantly there is the close icon on the common right hand end of the bar/item, which will make it go away. Hiding the item implies that there is no longer a way to undo the action and can be seen as confirmation of the action.

Comment 3

[Benedikt Pfeifer]

Attachment: WIP for un-deleting an account

*** Original post on bio 540 as attmnt 1376 at 2012-04-20 12:36:00 UTC ***

I had this WIP sitting around for quite a while already. Maybe someone finds it interesting. Judging from tests I'd say it works fine already (and I don't think it should cause any dataloss except for the expected things when removing an account).

Some things on it:
* It's not "un-deleting" the account ofcourse but rather postponing deletion until the account manager is closed. This matchs the behaviour of removed add-ons in the add-on manager.
* It's unpolished:
-  CSS needs to be fixed at least.
-  Contect menu for accounts that are to be deleted needs to be either disabled or changed to "Undo".
-  ...there was something else that I can't remember right now.

Thoughts:
About people who keep their account manager open (I think flo mentioned that he does this): we could put a timer on the items to remove them either on close of the window or after a certain amount of time whichever happens first.

Feedback welcome.

Comment 4

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 540 at 2012-04-20 12:45:28 UTC ***

Should a "to be deleted" account be disconnected immediately?

Comment 5

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

*** Original post on bio 540 at 2012-04-20 12:54:02 UTC ***

This seems to be fairly specific to the account manager, if there's other
places we should "provide an undo action" we should file more bugs.

Comment 6

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

On the behalf of Florian:
Closing bugs related to the Instantbird UI as WONTFIX, as the development of the standalone chat client Instantbird has stopped. Instantbird users are encouraged to migrate to Thunderbird. The user interface of instant messaging in Thunderbird will feel familiar, as the Thunderbird IM support started as a fork of Instantbird.