73163 - Form manager continues to pester me despite "NEVER FOR THIS SITE" clickage.

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Form Manager, defect)

Description

[dylang]

I've been doing work on the FM][ backend recently in Mozilla.  The problem is
that when I change some values in a form, and click [Update], Mozilla will
pester me with "Remember values in this form? [Yes] [Never for this site] [No]"
.. However, despite continued clicks of [Never for this site], Mozilla continues
to pester me each and every time I submit a form.

I think it is because form manager uses the URL instead of just the base site
name as a means for determining if it's supposed to fill out these forms.  This
mis-leading UI wording is VERY VERY frustrating.

An example of the form is on http://web.thock.com/mozilla/form_bug.html

Comment 1

[Stephen P. Morse]

This is working fine for me on win32.  tpreston, can you test this on linux and 
let me know if you can reproduce the failure.

One thing that puzzles me is that the reporter mentions two different URL's -- 
one in the URL field at the top of the bug report and one in the description of 
the bug.  The one in the URL field has nothing to do with form manger -- that 
one invokes password manager.  The one in the description field indeed invokes 
form manager.  But in both cases, if I click the "never" button, the next time I 
submit the form I do not get the do-you-want-to-save message.

Comment 2

[dylang]

It's the form manager which bothers me.  When I click [Never for this site], I
except that it will never pester me for site whose base hostname is
"FRESHMEAT.NET" .. this is not the case.  Instead it merely ads another FM
autogenerated URL (like freshmeat.net/admin/34234/12/) to a small file
somewhere.  Since each different op on this page changes the next URL (as almost
all data is stored in a URL hash), I am contiously pestered.

This is bad UI design.  Mozilla really SHOULD Never pester you for any forms on
a website if you say [NEVER for this site]... not just turn around and pester
you for forms with different URLs on the same site.

Comment 3

[Stephen P. Morse]

I'm still confused.  You mention the URL freshmeat.net and say it is form 
manager.  But that url contains a username/password field so the password 
manager gets invoked, not the form manager.

Regardless of semantics, this is still working for me.  When I click on never, 
the entry made in the password-manager dialog says that you will never be asked 
to save a login for "freshmeat.net".  Furthermore, you are now at 
freshmeat.net/login and if you fill out that form and submit it, you indeed do 
not get the do-you-want-to-save dialog.

Now if indeed there was some site that kept sending you to different hosts 
(not simply different paths) as you described, then what you are describing 
would be correct.  I don't know what I can do about that.  How would you go 
about defining the domain for which things should be rejected.  And don't tell 
me "everything before the .com" because that doesn't work for url's like 
a.b.co.nz.

Further complication comes about when different hosts in the same domain are 
actually different sites.  For example, a site might allow different companies 
or individuals to put up their webpages under that sites domain.  Now if you say 
never for one of these webpages, you don't want it to apply to the other 
webpages in that same domain.

So per your latest description of the bug (not from the behavior at the URL 
you provided), I have to mark this as wont-fix because I don't know how to fix 
it. 

Comment 4

[dylang]

An example of the KIND OF forms I deal with, as a freshmeat admin, is on
web.thock.com (as I wrote in my initial report).  Now, if you want to see how my
form manager data looks like after clicking NEVER FOR THIS SITE several times
while working on Freshmeat, go load http://web.thock.com/mozilla/buggy_forms.png

There you see how, despite the wording "FOR THIS SITE," I get pestered FOR THE
SAME SITE.  Either change the wording to "NEVER FOR THIS URL," or change the
behaviour to actually exclude the site! (basehostname & port number would seem
to be the sanest way of doing that)

This is **NOT** the login manager -- it's just that you don't have access to the
freshmeat admin backend (where the issue lies).  The issues is your form manager
and poor choice of words.

Comment 5

[Terri Preston]

Verified

Comment 6

[John Levon]

Dylan, this is bug 63271 you're talking about. It would probably have
helped if

a) you had provided a testcase people can actually test cases with
b) you didn't shout all the time

Anyway, this should probably be re-opened and duped to bug 63271. Terri,
didn't you read comment 4 ?

Comment 7

[dylang]

This is indeed bug 63271 dupage.

"a) you had provided a testcase people can actually test cases with"
Sorry, I couldn't do that because of work (at the time) and because I couldn't
just hand out access to FM :)

"b) you didn't shout all the time"
Yeah, I can't unsay things -- I acknowledge my comments weren't exactly helpful.
 I was very frustrated by this because I'd have to deal with several dialogs a
minute in some cases.  Especially with sleep deprivation I was going through at
the time it was a very unpleasant experience.  Thankfully it's over for now.