chilldream

https://plus.google.com/u/0/115668950429167517685/posts/hTe4...

I have to say I've been amused at the people exploiting the combo of "no character limit" and "collapse button at the end of the post" by tacking public domain novels on the end of innocent-seeming posts.

Is there any evidence that any site anywhere has seen an uptick in comment quality by requiring real names?

Anecdotally, any time I see a news website with Facebook Connect the comments are still swill. While I'd be willing to consider evidence to the contrary, I think this is a false correlation. Observing that anonymous comment threads tend to have more swill than social network threads says nothing. People act more like they would in real life on Facebook because Facebook has always tried to tie your online identity with your meatspace identity. Slapping real names on YouTube accounts makes them easier to stalk, and possibly easier to humiliate outside of the site, but it doesn't stop them from being a conglomerate of barely-literate human beings who are strangers to almost everybody and will rarely interact with each other more than once.

http://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hac...

Summary - the case involved was not a principled exception to free speech, but the diametric opposite; a judge basically ruled that you can't criticize the government during wartime because it would undermine the state.

> Holmes, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, affirmed Schenck's conviction on the theory that this expression could be punished in wartime even though it merely urged "peaceful measures such as a petition for the repeal" of conscription, on the theory that the government could suppress speech that might interfere with the draft.

Automatically verify everything you can. (billing ZIP matches credit card provider, email at least vaguely resembles an email address, all required fields are filled, etc). Raise a warning only if something is obviously wrong.

If the user hasn't yet chosen something like shipping options, consider making it a second step. Then you can have a pageflow along the lines of:

-User inputs basic information (name, address, email, financial details, everything necessary to know what they ordered and how they will pay for it) -User is taken to a page where it asks for shipping options, with user's stated mailing address printed right next to the form. Have an obvious way to fix the address from this page. -Print the user's email address near the mailing address for the same reason (if you feel the need to justify it, you can have a checkbox that says "send a receipt to email address" or "use email address for package tracking)

After an order is complete, take the user to a page that says "Your confirmation number is foo. Please save this page for your records. We will also send a receipt to email_address." The most visible thing on the page besides that message is their order, with the shipping address in bold. The next obvious is a link on this page they can click if something is wrong. Even if you never use the confirmation number for anything, it gives the customer an excuse to be observant without making them feel stupid.

Have a generous cancellation policy. If someone contacts you saying an order is wrong and you're positive which order they're talking about, let them cancel it. Worry about malicious cancellations only if they prove to be a real problem.

In your hypothetical case of a delete feature, if it's something the user doesn't click on a regular basis, and if you can't offer an Undo feature (as explained in one of those links above), then it could be fine. Even if it's a focus-stealing JavaScript popup. You have to be careful not to put it on common tasks, though; if the user sees it all the time, they'll train themselves to blindly click through. That's explained in one of the links above.

In this specific case, I think it's still useless. You can't ask a user a question you just asked them and expect the answer to change. Even if the user looks at your dialog, they're usually going to interpret the question as asking "Are you an idiot?" and the answer is "No!" Even when it's "Yes."

It's analogous to the situation in tech support where the solution is something silly like "the battery is in backwards." Nearly no one will believe you thanks to the Dunning-Kreuger effect, so you have to ask them to open the battery cover and blow the dust out, hoping that they put it back in correctly (and yes, there are various reasons why they'll often be more careful than when they first made the mistake)

Someone else already mentioned the correct answer, which is finding an excuse to repeat their email address elsewhere in a context other than "Are you sure you said what you just said?" Imagine having an email address field near the top, then near the bottom of the form having a field labeled "password recovery email" with their already-typed email already filled in. Or maybe have a list of checkboxes saying "send the following types of communications to email address". And if they finish, have a confirmation page saying "Your activation email has been sent to address. If this is incorrect, click this link to fix it."

What you want: User reads your dialog box notifying them to double-check their email address.

What actually happens: User maybe looks at your dialog box just long enough to figure out what it is before clicking whatever they think will make it go away. A tiny proportion of anal-retentive users who would have never gotten it wrong in the first place actually do what you asked them to do.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2008/09/study-confirms-users...

> Follow-up questions revealed that the students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs. The results suggest that a familiarity with Windows dialogs have bred a degree of contempt and that users simply don't care what the boxes say anymore.

http://mikepope.com/blog/DisplayBlog.aspx?permalink=480

> It's not that users are morons or that they "forget" to think. Its that users are trained to not think... dialog boxes usually say "If you want to tech the tech, you need to tech the tech with the teching tech tech. Tech the tech? Yes / No" If you press one of those buttons, something happens. If you press the other one, nothing happens. Very few users want nothing to happen -- in the majority of cases, whatever happens is what the user wanted to happen. Only in rare cases does something bad happen.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/01/54734...

> If you are trying to accomplish task A, and in the process of doing it, an unexpected dialog box B appears, you aren't going to stop and read and consider B carefully. You're going to try to find the quickest path to getting rid of dialog B. For most people, this means minimizing it or clicking "Cancel" or just plain ignoring it.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062....

> This may sound a little harsh, but you'll see, when you do usability tests, that there are quite a few users who simply do not read words that you put on the screen. If you pop up an error box of any sort, they simply will not read it. This may be disconcerting to you as a programmer, because you imagine yourself as conducting a dialog with the user. Hey, user! You can't open that file, we don't support that file format! Still, experience shows that the more words you put on that dialog box, the fewer people will actually read it.

http://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning

> What about making the warning harder to ignore? A subtle warning will get passed by, so let’s pull out all the stops: we’ll blink the screen and play a loud stretching noise to ensure that the user is paying attention. Try as we might, it still won’t work. The more in-your-face the warning is, the faster we’ll want to get away from it (by clicking “Okay”) and the more mistakes we’ll make. The thing is, no matter how fully in-your-face the computer presents the warning, we’ll still make the same mistake—clicking “Okay” when we don’t mean to.

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2008/10/31/nobody-reads/

> We all know that people don’t read dialog boxes, yet when there’s a problem with our UI, when people don’t understand what they’re supposed to do or when they do something wrong, we tend to try to solve the problem by adding more text to more dialog boxes.

Have you measured whether this feature actually helps anything? As the author said, people can see typos. But people who don't know their own email addresses will happily repeat errors.

Note that I'm specifically excluding sites like Facebook and LinkedIn that required real names from the start. I suspect it's a matter of whether users think of the site as being relevant to their personal identity. I'd even be willing to hypothesize that a random sample of Hacker News users considers HN more "real life" than a random sample of YouTube commenters who had g+ accounts crammed down their throats.

Dictionaries also have the same ambiguity problem (tuples can be dictionary keys). The noise problem is a bit more justified, but the entire construct is less needed since `D[k]` is less clunky and error-prone than `L.index`.

This happens to me about twice a year (not a firstname.lastname, but a commonword.commonword. It's like a stupidity-driven dictionary attack). The worst companies I've had to deal with:

Steam - took me multiple emails over the course of weeks, and they actually made me send them screenshots to prove the account was mine. I only went to this much trouble because I have a legit Steam account. Especially funny since I casually told them that I was a hair trigger away from just resetting the idiot's password and hijacking his account.

AT&T - Flat-out refused to unsub me from someone else's phone bills. After several calls to AT&T I finally gave up and called the customer. An AT&T rep actually had the balls to tell me that making me do this was for the customer's protection.

http://www.popehat.com/2013/03/04/on-the-internet-nobody-kno...

http://www.duicentral.com/dui/the-dui-exception/

* Unity - Completely ignored in Mint, in favor of MATE (Gnome 2 fork) and Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork, I believe?) * Amazon Search - removed * Mark Shuttleworth - Only upstream where no one has to care about him

"No, I didn't. I threw up a button that you'd never click on purpose hoping you'd accidentally click it and give me 'permission' to install crap you didn't want on your computer."

"Oh, good. For a minute there I thought you were some kind of scumbag."

(ethics of bundling undesired programs in installers notwithstanding, users are asserting that the thing didn't just change their defaults but also kept resetting their defaults even after the user changed it back. Not cool even if the user installed it entirely on purpose)

Now I'm wondering if I have a vision problem I didn't previously know about. I've been unimpressed with the upgrade myself, and one of my biggest complaints is that everything looks so flat that I have a hard time telling text and icons from the background.

I understand entirely why you object to the article's tone, but perhaps "Nobody's in jail for this, and it pisses us off, but it's not tenable to put people in jail for this so let's look at other options" is the perfect message for people who don't already understand what you're saying.

I did not say it was conclusive evidence; I said it was evidence. I'm well aware that "A is correlated to B" does not prove "A causes B" or even "A causes B or B causes A", but it is a data point in favor.

Saying "We should evaluate other evidence before we decide if A causes B" is reasonable skepticism. Acting as though "A is correlated to B" has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether A causes B is another matter.

(Not that I actually disagree with most of your post, mind you! The real message of "correlation is not causation" is "don't overrate this specific data point; it's a common mistake". But the realist shouldn't underrate it either.)