"Script for an Administrator's Tear"
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 at 08:25AM (The first person who can name that reference wins a prize.)
One of the DEC sessions last week was discussing accidental object deletion protection in W2K8, and prefaced it by saying that "80% of all authoritative restores are caused by user (in this case, administrator,) error, someone deleting something that they didn't mean to delete." Now, inasmuch as I look at that figure and think that 68% of all statistics are made up, it's actually somewhat believable. And I'll bet that of that 80%, at least half of those accidental deletions have exactly the same soundtrack:
*click*
"Yes, I'm sure, you stupid thing."
*click*
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, stop asking me and just do what I say!"
*click*
....
*pause*
".....ohhhhhh.......% expletive deleted %."
It's a tough line to tiptoe, between the oft-repeated administrator lament of "My kingdom for "I know what I'm doing, stop bothering me!" mode", versus even the best of us occasionally clicking something we didn't mean to. What's more, the above soundtrack would indicate that there aren't enough "Are you sure?" screens in the world to prevent even intelligent people from thinking that they know better.
A minor change in the GUI1 could make, in my mind, a world of difference here:
See that? I want "Are you sure you want to delete this object?" to be more descriptive: give me a DN, give me a display name, give me some visual indicator of which object I'm about to delete so that I can triple-dog-dare confirm that I moused onto the right one.
A silver bullet? Hardly. If you blindly click "Yes" on a dialog box, the contents of said dialog box aren't going to make a whit of difference.
Should we be deleting objects in ADUC anyway? Not if you're joe, but a lot of people still do.
Back in the mid-18th century when I started typing this, I meant for it to be about accidental deletion protection, but a lousy day at work has sent me off on a mild rant instead. I'll do accidental deletion protection tomorrow, and save this now before it gets too long.
[1] How do I know it's a minor GUI change? I don't, but I make a great armchair quarterback on things like this.
Reader Comments (3)
I was partialy saved by the fact that the GUI I was in limited the listing to only that many...damn select all Delete actually did what I told it to do!
So, yes, I called my boss, we briefly entertained the idea of writing three letters but ended up doing the right thing. :)