Bug with selection contact options

March 9, 2005 8:31 AM

When adding contacts, if you select some option under Family (or any section really) you cannot then deselect all Family options.
posted by xmutex to Bugs at 8:31 AM (11 comments total)

If you back up to the person's userpage, then reclick on the "add as contact" link, all the options are reset.
Assuming, of course, you haven't yet saved the contact.
posted by me3dia at 9:12 AM on March 9, 2005

And if you have, you can always deselect them and start over.
posted by sciurus at 9:20 AM on March 9, 2005

sciurus, the radio buttons, once clicked, can't be deselected.
posted by me3dia at 9:22 AM on March 9, 2005

I guess this is more feature request than a bug. And yeah, I knew you could back up and reclick the link, but... I was being petty!
posted by xmutex at 9:26 AM on March 9, 2005

I hate to tell you this but all radio buttons behave that way, regardless of author or site. Once selected, radio buttons (which are used for options where one and only one choice is applicable) cannot all be deselected.
posted by Lush at 10:13 AM on March 9, 2005

Yeah, me3dia, I guess I should've been more specific. I meant you can decontact a contact [from their user page] after you've already added them and then start again from scratch.
posted by sciurus at 10:24 AM on March 9, 2005

Lush: I realize that. The point I was making is that there is no way to deselect the value of a radio button group and that perhaps a button could be added that does this in the case of an erroneous or drunken selection and yes I realize that it's easy to backup and click the link again and start fresh and new like a wide-eyed child lost in wonderment but I thought still despite all this perhaps a mere feature request (albeit accidentally or perhaps again drunkenly marked as a bug) might be received well.
posted by xmutex at 11:50 AM on March 9, 2005

The problem is that for "family", "geographical", and "friendship", the radio-button paradigm is wrong. The options are mutually-exclusive (usually), but since there's no way to unselect entirely, there's no way to undo a misclick. Boo for bad GUI.

XFN sucks, anyhow. I want custom relationships, like "Fellow Mefiswapper".
posted by Plutor at 12:09 PM on March 9, 2005

In fact you can have radio buttons that are deselectable with a little bit of JavaScript, I think.
posted by kindall at 12:27 PM on March 9, 2005

Having non-selected radio buttons in HTML should never have been allowed in the first place, it breaks the whole point behind radio buttons and encourages people to abuse them for things like this.
posted by fvw at 3:59 PM on March 9, 2005

Yea, so, let's get rid of the radio buttons on the add contact page, eh.
posted by mek at 2:17 AM on March 10, 2005