[opensource-dev] Open Inventory Transfer

Baloo Uriza baloo at ursamundi.org
Thu Aug 19 22:16:36 PDT 2010


On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:56:29 -0700, Ricky wrote:

> Very good question, and was the reason for my note bout accidental
> inventory transfers.
> 
> The solution I alluded to was to pop up an "are you sure" style dialog
> box.  However, I hate those with a passion.  So I'm fishing for more
> optimal solutions.  It is possible there may be no good solution to this
> difficulty, but at least it will have been discussed, and may spawn
> other improvements or be revisited later.

Yeah, molly guards tend to be a stopgap for a bad design decision firmly 
engrained in the interface.  A good example of too many molly guards 
would be Outlook, where people ignore them to the point of just clicking 
yes to a dialogue effectively asking them "Are you sure you want to send 
that obscene joke to all 2500 employees in the company?"  (I have seen 
this happen, it caused Exchange to just about die under the pressure, and 
the resulting drama eventually became known long after the source was 
terminated for epic fail of schadenfreude proportions at that company.)

If it /has/ to work in a way that could become a gun, then it's better to 
let the user shoot themselves in the foot than it is to become annoying 
("rm" comes to mind as as a gun, and one that grows in size depending on 
the target and flags used; the GUI equivalent uses a trash folder as a 
safety in most environments).

But, given that there's already several workable way to transfer items 
between avatars, I'm not sure we need to be turning subwindows into 
guns. ;o)



More information about the opensource-dev mailing list