158910 - Voting without signing up.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement)

Description

[Knud Sørensen]

This would be very useful for getting 
feedback from users with out they have to 
create a bugzilla account.

I where think that it should work on ip basis.

Like every ip get one vote per product.
 
A new vote overwrite the old vote from the same ip .

Knud

Comment 1

[Alan]

Nice thought (i would not have read the report if it had not caught my attention).  
it might be nice to more get feedback from people unwilling to get an account
but i dont expect this will work.  I have thought before about ways to get more
feedback and lower the barrier to entry but the barrier to getting a bugzilla
account is really low.  
All they ask for is an email address.  If the barrier to entry is any lower and
you would risk getting a lot more incredibly poor quality bug reports.  
Just take a look at slashdot if you are in any doubt that web polls and voting
is  totally meaningless and easily tampered with.  In fact i would geuss there
is not much stopping me from having multiple bugzilla accounts and voting
repeatedly for the same bug.  

the Netscape products such as Mozilla and AOL at least have Talkback which any
user can use to send feedback without having to subscribe.  (newer versions of
talkback allow users to create new bugs as well as automatically creating them
after a crash)

do you really think this is a good idea?
I am not sure if I have enough priviledges to mark this as WONTFIX so I will
leave it alone.  

Comment 2

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

IPs change, or I shared - I share 3 IPS among half of Sydney for my cable
provider (transparent proxies).

Getting a bugzilla account is not hard, and the complexity of coding this makes
it not worth it.

Comment 3

[Knud Sørensen]

Alan

>All they ask for is an email address.
Yes, I agree that it is easy to sign up.
but some people simply don't want to. 
Today people know that to protect you from spam 
your should not give out your email address easily.

I am one of those people and I have been on the
bugzilla web site 5-10 times in the last 2 years,
to verify that you already had a bug.
I would have used a ip voting function, 
but i would not give you my email address. 

And then bugzilla shows your email to every one using 
the "Show votes for this bug" page.
Alan please notice that I don't suggest that 
it is possible to submit bug reports without signing up 
only voting for exciting bug reports.

Normally you get your ip from your isp,
so it is not as easy to tampered with as you email.

Bradley:

Yes, if you don't sign up you would have to 
share your votes with half of Sydney 
but if you sign up you still get your 10 votes.
But it is not important how many votes your get 
what is important is that the developers get 
a good indicator for what bugs is popular.



The complexity is not great in php (don't know perl) the voting script would
look like this

<?php
  include('db.php');
  
  if(!db_execute("UPDATE ipvote SET bugid=$id WHERE ip=$REMOTE_ADDR")
	db_execute("INSERT INTO ipvote (bugid,ip) VALUES ('$id','$REMOTE_ADDR')")
?>

Comment 4

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

This will not happen.  IPs are shared between users and are not fixed to a user.
This makes getting more votes too easy.  Requiring an email account at least
makes it difficult enough that most people wouldn't bother.

If you can't be bothered getting an account I can't be bothered considering your
vote.

Not disclosing your email address is a different issue, and it solution is
independent of this proposal.