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Comment by nwh | Hacker News Reader

Lots of actions are destructive and can't work with an "undo" quite so well as in that example. I would prefer to see a confirm diglogue for deleting an account, changing a password, that sort of thing. I would tend to avoid it anyway, as an undo button isn't something users are going to be looking out for in a web context.

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Not to mention, that for many of these destructive actions adding a undo function often incurs in higher storage costs.

For example, in the case of deleting information, the easiest way to provide an undo function is to never really delete anything and just flag as deleted (something that doesn't free up storage, and if implemented without the users' knowledge, is abusive in terms of data privacy and ownership).

As for users not expecting the existence of an undo button in a web context, well, Gmail for instance has an "undo" link for lots of actions (archiving, moving to trash, etc.). I'm sure other web services provide similar things too.

Just clean it up later... flag as "delete in 1 day" or something.

What about this- clicking "delete account" loads a screen where the account is removed from the frontend, along with an undo button. When the user leaves the page, the account is really deleted. Can you see any problems with this?

I like the ingenuity but how would we track when the page has been left - conceivably I could delete an account on Friday then click undo on Sunday.

I guess if it immediately gets soft deleted and in a maintainance batch gets purged. Until maint runs the undo link could still work (although it would still only display until they left the page).

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