Destructive
Preventing an accidental click from destroying data or causing an outage on a server is important.
However Confirmation dialogs and prompts are evil. Bad bad bad. I've given talks on this at conferences, and you can see lots of articles about this on the net.
There are three levels of problem here:
- Preventing an outage with a safety switch
- Clearly describing data loss before it happens.
This does not cover trivially undoable operations where no outage or data loss would occur. Those should simply never have a prompt or special handling. The action should just happen, and/or have an way to undo.
Example Implementation: https://cdn.rawgit.com/stefwalter/cockpit/b167db210609f235e3f2032122f0c2212fec6c38/modules/shell/STYLE.html#safety-button
Example use cases:
- Turning off a network card
- Destroying a network bond
- Unmounting a disk
No actual data loss occurs, but having a network outage as the result of a fat fingered click is not okay. We need a safety cover for the button here:
There are examples of this on the iPhone, see the weather app.
Example use cases
- Format a disk
- Delete a partition
- Destroy RAID
After clicking the button to delete a disk partition, or destroy a RAID, we should describe in detail what's going to be destroyed. Ideally this will happen inline and replace the item in question.