I got burned yesterday by bulk actions, and wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience. tl;dr I accidentally archived hundreds of topics instead of dismissing them. 
I was able to reverse it by going to eg /filter?q=status%3Aarchived to see all the topics I had archived and then individually unarchive them again.
This was my mistake obviously but maybe could have been prevented with better UX?
It’s great to have “dismiss” on the bulk actions pulldown because it travels down the page with you and is easy to get to. But it is also problematic because the scope of the actions is different:
- “dismiss” only affects you and is non-destructive
- all other options on the pulldown are admin actions that affect everyone and have a wide ranging impact, and are potentially destructive
My feeling is that we want to:
- remove “dismiss” from the admin bulk actions pulldown
- add a new “dismiss” button next to it
- remove the “dismiss” buttons from the top and bottom of the page that doesn’t move down the page with you
This change would also simplify the UX somewhat, since the “dismiss” button would no longer show in the nav at the top of the page.
This is the PR adding dismiss to the bulk actions pulldown as it is now: FEATURE: Add more bulk dismiss buttons with confirmation by Drenmi · Pull Request #29331 · discourse/discourse · GitHub
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I think there’s also ‘update notifications’ that’s just for you too (in the main topic lists, there are a few more in the PM bulk actions).
I like the separators in the topic wrench menu:
Could a similar thing be applied to bulk actions (both main topic list and PM) to place ‘things just for you’ in a section at the top, and things below reserved for TL4/mods/admins?
You could then allow more TL to have access to that top section as well. Particularly useful for managing your inbox, for example.
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Cool! I was not aware of the “update notifications” bulk action. Still learning new things about Discourse every day..
I like your idea too! But worry I might still perform a destructive action when intending to do a day to day action like dismissing topics from NEW or archiving PMs. Having two separate buttons (one for my bulk actions, one for admin bulk actions) would help.
To explain my experience further.. what went wrong for me is that I use bulk actions daily to dismiss messages in the moderators group inbox, here on meta. That looks like this - note the “Move to Archive” button near the middle of the list.
When selecting topics to dismiss them, my muscle memory had me looking for the same place in the list instead of “dismiss” right at the top.
Ah yes, I think having the term ‘archive’ mean different things in different contexts may exacerbate that too.
Though even with a separate button I think people are still open to the same issue. I imagine it could be quite easy to open the wrong bulk action menu and select ‘archive’ if that’s what you think you’re looking for.
For the ‘destructive’ side, technically they’re not strictly destructive in that they can be undone again. Though there are a few other ux/feature topics asking for bulk ‘undo’ style actions too (in this case ‘bulk un-archive’, though I think I remember one for bulk un-delete).
Where would you place the ‘move to archive’ bulk action in the PM version? Would those be pulled out into a separate ‘personal’ button too?
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