180040 - view comments by threshhold

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 283695

(Bugzilla :: Creating/Changing Bugs, enhancement)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

[rfe] view comments by threshhold

I've noticed that bugzilla is often used like a forum, like slashdot, and the
annonymous posters ("me too!" or worse, "you are an idiot for not fixing this bug!")

when a bug gets 50 or 100 (or more) comments, it becomes an effort to read it,
and to get out the critical data.

here's what would be useful:

1)  every person who comments in a bug gets a rank
2)  I can view a bug (like slashdot) with a threshhold.  (only show me all, or
posters with rank above x)

I'm not sure how to determine rank, or how people grow in rank.

since anyone can log bugs, maybe they get points based on the number and quality
of bugs they log?

maybe, just like cvs access, staff can "bless" certain people with a high rank,
and if abused, reduce the rank.

comments?

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

hmm, now that's a thought.  We already have two levels of "rank" that Bugzilla
knows how to determine...  "canconfirm" and "editbugs".

Comment 2

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

See http://www.advogato.com/ -- I think we want something like that system's
trust metric, with a strong seed (root set) and active defenses against attacks.
 I want to + or - my estimation of bugzilla users and have my trust propagate.

Some group near the seed would have to watch all comments, in order to + the
newcomers who comment well.  But others could do as sspitzer hopes to do, and
filter brutally.

/be

Comment 3

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

adding Gerv who has been working on some bug reporter quality metrics. Maybe we
could build something around that. 

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

The original plan for the quality metrics was to stop people filing new bugs
based on them, but we abandoned that in favour of an education approach. And I
think the same thing is what's needed here.

Bugzilla is not a discussion forum, it's a bug system. We should make it clear
what acceptable Bugzilla behaviour is, and exclude people who persistently flout
those guidelines. 

If we add any sort of comment ranking or moderation to Bugzilla, I think it
would have several effects:

- It would encourage people to treat bugs even more like a discussion forum
  than now. This would make the problem worse, not better.
- It would take up people's time doing the moderation or ranking.
- It would cause endless disputes and altercations about what was, and wasn't,
  a useful contribution, and whinges from people who got a bad metric.
- Any filtering by e.g. the assignee which excluded the default setting for
  comments would mean useful contributions from new people would not be seen.
- It would mean the Bugzilla team had to write a lot of code to manage all this,
  when we have our plates very full with performance and Zippy (the large
  corporation which recently adopted Bugzilla.)

If we have a problem with people misbehaving in Bugzilla, let's deal with it.
Currently we don't get out the "disable account" stick very often - is it time
for it to be used more?

Gerv

Comment 5

[Daniel Mota Leite]

this bug is related to bug 225751

Educating the user doesnt solve the problem of some bugs have high rate of noise and no way to filter then.

The "disable account" should only be used in extreme cases, not as a educational measure, it would only make people angry and some of then would for sure retaliate by creating new random accounts all over the place just to protest. mass use of the "Disable account" would create many hostility towards mozilla.org (and as reaction, hostility from the devs towards the users). it would backfire in the end, for sure.

Comment 6

[Aleksey Nogin]

I also think that bug 225751 is the way to go. Bug 225751 would allow an "enperienced"/"trusted" user to respond to some of the "me too" stuff without decreasing the signal/noise ratio for the people who are filtering the "non-technical" section.

Comment 8

[Timwi]

I think this bug should be marked a duplicate of bug 225751, or perhaps WONTFIX if you think the ideas are too different. Basically, this bug suggests that /people/ should be ranked, while the other bug suggests that /comments/ should be ranked. I think it's pretty obvious that the latter is preferable; otherwise useful comments can easily get lost, and useless comments can easily slip through.

Comment 9

[Jon B]

bug 225751: Create a separate section or "talk page" for the bug and hope that people make their advocacy comments there instead of the main section.

bug 180040: Rank users and view only comments by users beyond a threshold

bug 377311: Rank comments and view only those that are beyond a threshold

Comment 10

[Edward Z. Yang]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Bugzilla is not a discussion forum, it's a bug system. We should make it clear
> what acceptable Bugzilla behaviour is, and exclude people who persistently flout
> those guidelines. 

I would then propose to recast this proposal in a different light: allow developers to "refactor" bug pages. Comments, being very linear in structure, are great for discussion but not for the retention/access of useful data. If a developer can easily "float" comments up to the top of the pile, or easily "extract" data into a wiki-like page (which I would not expect would be a permission available to the general public), comment rot becomes manageable: keep track of the new comments, put the useful bits on the wiki page, and ignore the rest.

Maybe this needs to be a different bug, but it's a bit difficult to follow the discussion on all these different tickets.

Comment 11

[Jon B]

(In reply to comment #5)
> The "disable account" should only be used in extreme cases, not as a
> educational measure, it would only make people angry and some of then would for
> sure retaliate by creating new random accounts all over the place just to
> protest. mass use of the "Disable account" would create many hostility towards
> mozilla.org (and as reaction, hostility from the devs towards the users). it
> would backfire in the end, for sure.

Definitely.  The goal with a feature like this should be to minimize stress for both the users and the developers.  Make the users feel satisfied that they've expressed their desires, yet allow the developers to view a clean summary of the actual content without any noise.  No one should be banned, minimized, or made to feel insignificant or unwanted if they don't have to be.  This just creates resentment, which bounces back at the developers and then bounces back at the users and so on.  Who wants to do any kind of (volunteer) work in such an unwelcoming environment?

Comment 12

[Jeff]

I've suggested an up/down vote feature for comments (bug#532474) that would likely aid in develop ranking for users as well as providing a metric for the usefulness of a comment. After getting used to using StackOverflow for solving problems I can see a great value in this type of functionality as a way of expressing and sharing opinion about specific comments.