164310 - [Voting] "Reason for my vote" feature

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Creating/Changing Bugs, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

For every vote someone makes, they should be able to add a reason for their 
vote. This would be shown on the "Votes list" as a text followed by ellipses 
if its too long to fit on the line. This would also be a link to the whole 
text.

For instance...

Who                Number of votes    Reason
[e-mail]  1                  I can't use Mozilla because of this bug!
[e-mail]  1                  I think this bug should be fixed becau...

This feature would make it less likely that people would feel that simply 
giving a vote isn't enough and will also make it so that people post 
less "useless" comments and also provide input on why a bug has so many votes.

Comment 1

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

I suspect that people are really really really unlikely to look at those
comments, and Idoubt that it will stop people commenting anyway. The
information-value of such comments is likly to be close to zero, too.

WONTFIX?

Comment 2

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

I don't know about that. I have seen plenty of comments where people say, "I 
won't use Mozilla until this is fixed. My job requires blah blah blah". These 
are certainly things that would go well in that area. Maybe (possibly) we 
could even accept these kinds of comments in the vote section from people that 
don't give it a vote but still want to say something, and it could be on a 
separate page linked-to from the vote page or something almost like a 
guestbook. Of course, that's a separate issue.

Comment 3

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

yes, but:

a) That may or may not be true
b) In 99% of cases, the developer knows the impact, and its usually eiteher
overstated, or it is major, and people are working on a fix anyway.

Most importantly

c) Noone who can do anything is every going to look at the 'reason', anyway.

Comment 4

[Jason Bassford]

I like this idea a lot, but I think it should be expanded.

I think that people should also be able to vote AGAINST a bug, rather than just
for it.  That way we'd end up actually having a pretty useful polling tool -
with for/against and comments.  It would certainly be better than it is now. 
(Even just comments on postive votes would make the system more useful - let's
face it, it's pretty much a waste of space at at the moment and a vote doesn't
really translate into anything worthwhile.)

Comment 5

[XandreX]

as I see things, with today's bugzilla, I can vote AND write a comment
explaining why I voted (and I can write as many comments I want as the
discussion goes on).
1/ will I ever read others' reason for voting unless I'm bored ?
2/ will what will be written there be worth being read ?

About the other point : I think it's a good idea to vote /against/ a bug, but
remain some technical modifications on bugzilla I guess (especially in the
database ?), and in the presentation (will a vote against substract or be listed
next to the votes for the bug ?). has a RFE been opened for this idea ?

Comment 6

[Jason Bassford]

> I can vote AND write a comment explaining why I voted

If 30 people all vote for a bug because of reason X, we *don't* want to see 20
comments to the effect of "I like this idea because of X".  That's just SPAM,
along the lines of "me too".  But expressing the "me too" in a database that
keeps track of vote reasoning and which is *not* emailed to everybody in the
list would avoid the SPAM while at the same time allowing interested parties to
guage specific audience response to a bug via some kind of non-intrusive query.

Comment 7

[mental]

My idea for implementation would be to have a dual entry:  e=<x,y>, where x
would be a categorical reason for the vote and y would be the specific reason.

That way, the administrator could choose the set X of all x categorical reasons,
and let the set Y be open.  The admin could also choose whether or not to enable
Y at all, as there is likely to be a lot of noise (but also the most insight) here.

Comment 8

[Stewart Gordon]

Eight votes, eight comments.  It would be interesting if each of the comments
was written by one of the voters and gave the person's reason for wanting the
feature.

I've just realised a way that it would be useful, especially once bug 48570 is
dealt with.  Even if there are lots of for votes and only a handful of against
votes (or vice versa), it would make it easy to look and judge whether the
against voters actually have a stronger case than the masses of for voters.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> it would make it easy to look and judge whether the
> against voters actually have a stronger case than the masses of for voters.

Not necessarily. It would depend on how the "against" vote was defined and how
the voter sees it when voting. see bug 48570 c46.

Comment 10

[Frédéric Buclin]

We don't want two places where comments are displayed. Developers most of the time don't look at votes at all, and if someone has something useful to say, he should do it in a comment.