216738 - Throttle frequency of comment and other changes

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Creating/Changing Bugs, enhancement)

Description

[Heikki Toivonen (remove -bugzilla when emailing directly)]

Problem: some bugs attract a huge number of people who can't stay quiet, and
feel the need to comment, which results in enormous amounts of spam to
subscribers (see the MNG bugs, for example).

Proposed solution: throttle down the frequency of comments and other changes
allowed in bugs

Details:

Ok, so I haven't fully thought about this, but basically the bug owner could
edit some settings on a bug that would make it so Bugzilla would not accept new
changes to the bug in x hours|days, except when the user is the bug owner, QA or
possibly reporter. Maybe the owner could select a whitelist from the CC at the
same time and allow those to post regardless of throttle. Ideally the time could
be settable by the owner, but initially a global setting would be ok as well.

There are some obvious disadvantages in this, like when someone really has
something important to say but the throttle prevents a few of their attempts and
they give up. A way to mitigate this could perhaps be to make the bug go into a
batch mode when the throttle limit has been exceeded, and post the all the
pending submissions once the throttle eases up. Of course, batch mode presents
its own problems but we should probably open a new bug for that if needed.

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

No voter, mostly empty CC list, and this is IMO a good way to get people even more upset about some given bug. If they cannot comment in the bug itself, they would probably start filing dupes just to say what they want to say. "They try to make me shut up!". Plus, this would pretty hard to implement in a clever way, and would make the UI too complex compared to the benefit of moderating some hot bugs.

Comment 2

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Agreed fully with LpSolit.