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Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for posting this. Fortunately I'm not one of the ones affected, but I took the opportunity to rotate my Dropbox password and audit/prune my authorized devices.

https://www.dropbox.com/account/security

I had a bunch of old devices in that list and removing each one triggered a full page refresh, which took longer than normal thanks to the JS-driven single-page design of the dashboard. The removal request itself went over AJAX, so I guess someone figured it was easier to throw away the page state every click than to remove an element from the list's DOM. Made the whole thing much more tedious than it needed to be; a form with a series of checkboxes and a single "remove" button at the bottom would have done fine.

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Did the exact same thing, had the exact same experience. I had a lot of really old devices on there.

So some of the removal requests go over AJAX, other submit a form. I started to write some JS to inject into the page to add checkboxes and a submit button and fire off an AJAX to remove the selected items but I think only the computers (not phone/tablet/etc) use AJAX. What's annoying is the AJAX request even has an array for the devices to unlink... It just passes up a single id.

Same for me when removing a device. Meanwhile, removing a linked app works just as you'd expect

It's funny because the apps linked section below that works exactly like it should, the request goes over ajax and then the DOM is updated without a full page refresh. I wonder if the different UX was an oversight or intentional...

> so I guess someone figured it was easier to throw away the page state every click than to remove an element from the list's DOM.

Yet another reason to love what React and other virtual dom libs give us

Can we leave the toolkit evangelism to a different thread? The subject is behavior which was routinely implemented better in the mid-90s without using JavaScript at all.

I agree with the first part of your statement, but I am curious how AJAX behavior was implemented without JavaScript? Are you talking about Java? CGI? I have no idea.

Sorry if that was confusing, I wasn't trying to say AJAX-like behaviour happened without JavaScript but simply echoing mintplant's concluding observation that a 1995-style <table> with a bunch of checkboxes and a remove button would work just as well as the fancier tech stack.

(That said, I'm certainly not saying that JavaScript doesn't allow much richer UIs, only that as an industry we're often prone to assuming that the cooler tech automatically implies benefits to users – e.g. ask anyone who's had to reload a simple form UI because the AJAX logic failed to handle network / server errors, out of order dispatch, etc. in a non-confusing manner – or everyone should love your favorite tool without asking whether it has actual benefits for what they need to do.)

Please take a chill pill mate. I'm just a happy user of that, as I am of many many other free software others have cooked up.

Weird, just removed an old laptop from mine and didn't trigger a full page refresh.

It's triggering full page refresh on removing devices for me, but not on removing old web sessions.

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