1196291 - Prevent users without editbugs from commenting on resolved bugs, unless they are already involved in the bug

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: Bug Creation/Editing, enhancement)

Description

[:Gijs (he/him)]

See http://www.gijsk.com/blog/2015/08/why-you-might-be-asked-to-file-a-new-bugissue-instead-of-commenting-on-old-ones/ .

It would be nice if bugzilla helped avoid this by making it easy for people to file a new bug instead, and gathering the same data we get from new bugs (UA, detailed steps to reproduce).

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

(...continuing from IRC...)

It's also a useful self-triage mechanism. If a user has found a bug close to their existing issues, we can use that to help them file a new bug in the right spot automagically.

We might want to have a grace-period involved, to allow commenting on recently-closed bugs. I'm mostly saddened by this happening in old bugs, where users are basically talking to an empty room. But Gijs' points are still valid no matter what the age. And, really, if it's simple and painless to get a new bug filed, everyone still wins.

I was also thinking about cases where there's still ongoing activity / discussion / concerns in the bug, even though it's closed. But the more I think about it, the more I'm starting to think even that might be best to bump to a followup bug.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

Perhaps with a checkbox to comment on the old bug?

"I filed a followup: bug <N>, <summary>"

Comment 5

[:glob ✱]

Bug 1364947 points to cloning bugs as an abuse vector, so we shouldn't encourage that (in fact we should discourage it by fixing that bug).

Comment 7

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

(In reply to :glob ✱ from comment #5)

Bug 1364947 points to cloning bugs as an abuse vector

Preventing cloning is unlikely to have prevented the specific situation that prompted bug 1364947. People wanted a place to vent and cloning was easy, but manually creating a new bug isn't much more work. Manually copying all 50+ participants would have been more work so we might save spamming some of the original participants, but I bet a bug filer in such a situation will make sure the prominent folks (assignee, reviewers, notable arguers) are copied.

If we're disabling comments for spam prevention, cloning is not a big worry. New bugs get triaged and noticed, and getting noticed is the last thing these spammers seem to want. That's my guess for why they repeatedly comment in the same bugs: if no one's taking much notice of them it's safer to keep plugging that same spot than spreading into different old bugs whose participants might get pissed off enough to block them.

This is not so much to argue against fixing bug 1364947 (it might help some), but fixing this bug will have far more benefit. I hope the two bugs don't get tied together into some larger chunk of work that will delay this aspect.

Comment 8

[BMO Automation]

Attachment: GitHub Pull Request

Comment 9

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

Merged
https://github.com/mozilla-bteam/bmo/commit/9ee930954ad7d8213b52cde2e3c15f883f04b179

Comment 10

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

This is live in production.