158353 - (StopMorons!) Disallow novice users (without bugzilla account) from use of Advanced Entry form

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Wesha]

Because novice users can use Advanced Entry Form, they bypass Bugzilla Helper
and submit bugs that lack BuildID, Steps To Reproduce and other crucial
information. Pleeease let's prevent them from bypassing that?

Comment 1

[Wesha]

Seems like this bug avoided everybody's attention, so I raize the priority in
hope to attract some. People reporting "nytimes" mostfreq bug a few times a day
are kinda annoying. :(

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

myk, asa: what's your view here? When we have the new guided template, should we
allow access to the advanced form only to e.g. people with canconfirm?

Gerv

Comment 3

[Wesha]

Kai Lahmann <[e-mail]> says that he's working on a new page to replace
current http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helper.html

The main problem of the current one is the fact that the "Advanced Bug Entry
Form" link is on top of the page, and most people don't read anything and just
click on it. One of the solutions must be moving to the end of the document, and
generally making it not so obvious, so people have to read stuff to pick it out,
not just because it stands out.

I beleive that revamping that page will reduce the number of bad reports
greatly, but the solution proposed in this bug might still be helpful. For
example, we can let the user see the Advanced Entry Form only after they
submitted 2...5 bugs, and got a general idea on what info we need.

Comment 4

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

gerv has rewritten that page, and I blieve that myk was going to turn it on RSN.

You'd want canconfirm, not canedit, if you did protect against this, though. I
don't know if its such a big deal - just rearrange the links on the front page.

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

> Kai Lahmann <[e-mail]> says that he's working on a new page to replace
> current http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helper.html

Why on earth didn't he get in touch with its maintainer (me) before starting
doing that? I've already rewritten it:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided .

Gerv

Comment 6

[Wesha]

> I've already rewritten it:

Wow, cool. Now we only need to replace the old helper with it...

Comment 7

[Wesha]

I've noticed that the new Helper has been put to work. Let's see if it reduces a
number of bad bugs reported. If it does, I will mark this WFM. ;)

Comment 8

[Brant Gurganus]

[RFE] is deprecated in favor of severity: enhancement.  They have the same meaning.

Comment 9

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

This is not WFM, in my opinion. See bug 157157 and bug 173311, for example. They
both show up on Chimera's most duped list in the Bugzilla Helper, but that
doesn't help when people by-pass the helper.

Comment 10

[Michael Lefevre]

Henri: er... nobody said it was WFM. it's just been labelled as an enhancement
rather than a bug, which I think is right, although it's an important enhancement :)

Brant: if you're going to switch bugs to "enhancement" severity because [RFE] is
deprecated, you could remove the [RFE] while you're at it :)

Comment 11

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

I was referring to comment #7.

Comment 12

[Wesha]

I put in a higher severity because it's REALLY annoying for me to dig through
bad bugreports that would never happen if the Helper was the only option.

Brant: please DO NOT strip [RFE]s from the summary! It's a good visual that
makes RFEs stand out in the list immediately, just like red color for Criticals.
Yes I know that RFEs are printed in italic, but it's a bad visual, it takes time
for the eye to recognize the font, while [RFE] clearly stands out.

Comment 13

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

> Yes I know that RFEs are printed in italic, but it's a bad visual, it takes time
> for the eye to recognize the font, while [RFE] clearly stands out.

This is what user stylesheets are for. If you don't like it, change it. You have
the power. 

Gerv

Comment 14

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

*** Bug 174606 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

How hard would it be to simply disallow people that can't CONFIRM bugs from
using the Advanced form?

Comment 16

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Not hard at all. See comment 2. :-) We're currently thinking about several
things to control the bug problem, and this is one of them.

Gerv

Comment 17

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Is it appropriate to tie this role to the canconfirm role?  This sort of tying
together of roles is something I think we should be avoiding in the world of
newgroups.  Of course, bmo can use the same group for both roles, but that's a
site customisation.

Should there be a general way to place restrictions on specific formats?  If
not, how would we do this for this specific CGI/format?  I hope the intention
isn't to hardcode the format name into the CGI.

Comment 18

[Michael Lefevre]

having more groups with fine grained controls over permissions is a wider issue
and if that is to be solved first, this problem will exist until 2006... tying
it to canconfirm is a workable solution that's easy to implement.

in fact, merely shifting the link to the advanced form to a less prominent
position would work fine, as suggested back in comment 4 - the problem is that
people see the "report bug" link and use it before they get to see anything else.

Comment 19

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I think automatic and silent conversion to format=guided if the user does not
have canconfirm is the correct solution - it's a one-line change, which doesn't
require us to e.g. mess with the "File a Bug" link in the footer and stuff like
that.

This would probably be a b.m.o.-specific customisation. format=guided isn't
(yet) in the tree and, even then, a lot of sites will want the standard form for
everyone.

Gerv

Comment 20

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

> having more groups with fine grained controls over permissions is a wider
> issue and if that is to be solved first, this problem will exist until
> 2006...

How is this a wide issue?  You either tie it to canconfirm or you introduce a
single new role that gets linked to a group.  I don't see what's particularly
complicated here.  If we can't do it now we'll never be able to do it.

Comment 21

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

staff gave the go-ahead for this on b.m.o. yesterday, so I'll try and whip up a
patch soon. I don't think this is appropriate for standard Bugzilla - does
anyone disagree?

Gerv

Comment 22

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Attachment: Patch v.1

Here's the three-liner which forces people without canconfirm to use the guided
format.

Gerv

Comment 23

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Comment on attachment 103251 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v.1

>Index: enter_bug.cgi
>===================================================================
>RCS file: /cvsroot/mozilla/webtools/bugzilla/enter_bug.cgi,v
>retrieving revision 1.75
>diff -u -r1.75 enter_bug.cgi
>--- enter_bug.cgi	1 Oct 2002 22:41:07 -0000	1.75
>+++ enter_bug.cgi	17 Oct 2002 23:04:26 -0000
>@@ -217,6 +217,10 @@
> 
> confirm_login() if (!(Param("usebuggroupsentry")));
> 
>+if (!UserInGroup("canconfirm")) {
>+    $::FORM{'format'} = "guided";
>+}

Nit: simpler as a single line:

UserInGroup("canconfirm") || $::FORM{'format'} = "guided";

or...

$::FORM{'format'} = "guided" if !UserInGroup("canconfirm");


r=myk

This is a b.m.o-specific hack, I presume.

Comment 24

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Attachment: Patch v.2

Nit fixed. Yes, this is a b.m.o.-specific hack.

Gerv

Comment 25

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

in that case -> mozilla.org

Comment 26

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

.

Comment 27

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is now up on b.m.o. Marking fixed.

Gerv

Comment 28

[Wesha]

Thanks guys, I hope this wil greatly reduce the number of senseless bugreports.

verified.

Comment 29

[S Woodside]

It may be true that you can trust people with canconfirm to file noise bug
reports. But, it is a logical error to then conclude that people not on
canconfirm are incapable of filing signal bug reports.

What is a noisy/bad bug report? Looking at the comments here, I see that dupes
are one major complaint. Bugs that require version information and don't have
them is another. So, great, you want to stop people from filing those noisy
bugs. But speaking as someone who has a high signal/noise ratio on bugzilla but
doesn't have (and doesn't care to have) canconfirm, I'm in the lurch here. And
you set up the code so that I can't work around it either :-\

Comment 30

[Wesha]

You don't get the point. People without canconfirm are still able to submit
bugs; however, they're forced to go through the step-by-step Bugzilla helper,
that will
do at least something to prevent them from submitting stuff like bug 172634.
What's so bad about it?

Comment 31

[S Woodside]

What's so bad is that I want to use the advanced form!

Sure, I've filed a few dozers myself: 
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172436
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168748

but generally speaking my bugs are signal, not noise.

My point in Comment #29 is that people here seem to have made the following
logical leap:
a) canconfirm => allow advanced form
   therefore,
b) !canconfirm => !allow advanced form

but as anyone who knows logic will know, that is not a valid logical statement
(insert monty python skit here).

It seems to me that what you want to do is "encourage" people to use the guided
form. That's cool to me. But please add a backdoor so that I can use the
advanced form.

Comment 32

[Wesha]

Why I insisted on (!canconfirm => !allow advanced form) is, people without
canconfirm were INTENTIVELY skipping the wizard! Last month, ALL the links from
public places (i.e. mozilla.org "file a bug" start page link, Mozilla's QA->File
a Bug main menu, etc) were pointing to a wizard, but about 40% of novice
reporters were DELIBERATELY SKIPPING THE WIZARD, just to file garbage bugs!
Disallowing them to do so is the only way to get rid of such garbage.

And give me one good reason why you HAVE to use advanced form and not wizard?
Please no "rteal man never uses wizards!" things. What can you achieve with
advanced form you cant with wizard?

Comment 33

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

> But speaking as someone who has a high signal/noise ratio on bugzilla but
> doesn't have (and doesn't care to have) canconfirm,

This is your problem, right here. Canconfirm can be viewed as "permission to use
the advanced form". Saying you don't care to have canconfirm is the same as
saying you don't care to have this permission. Having canconfirm doesn't force
you to become part of the QA team or do bug triage. It merely means the bugs you
report are (by default) NEW, and that you can use the advanced form to report
them. If you still want to report bugs as UNCONFIRMED, you can do that (it gives
you a choice.)

We choose to make people prove they can file good bugs before giving them this
permission. That's fair enough. If you've filed loads of good bugs (and yes, we
do get to define "good", but it's well-documented) then send me their URLs and
I'll give you canconfirm.

Gerv