232199 - Reporter link with real name shouldn't display email address

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Bugzilla :: User Interface, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

Since the reporter linkification, it no longer necessary to display both the
email address and the real name, for a display as per the comment entries.
Old bugzilla: Reporter: [name] [email]
New bugzilla: Reporter: <a href="mailto:[email]">[name] [email]</a>
Desired result: Reporter: <a href="mailto:[email]">[name || email]</a>

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

See bug 222204 comment 4 and onwards.  This was debated (though not very
seriously) on the original implementation bug.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Yeah, the new arrangement isn't very aesthetically pleasing.

We need to sort out this email address/real name thing. In some places we use
one (either out of necessity like QA contact, or for other reasons), in other
places we use the other, or both. Some consistency would be nice.

Problem is, the only thing we could standardise on would be email address, as
it's unique - but then real name wouldn't be used at all...

Gerv

Comment 3

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

There's also nick, which isn't unique at the moment (it's computed from the
email address) but could be made so if we distinguished login IDs from email
addresses, either by adding an "email address" field to Bugzilla, then letting
people change their login_name to anything so long as they put a valid address
into the "email address" field; or by keeping login_name as the email address
but adding a separate username field that people can populate.

Either way the username field would be unique and could be used as the nick, and
we could fall back on the email address (or, as we do now, an abbreviated
version of it, if we're willing to accept some potential non-uniqueness).

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I'm not sure that adding yet another monicker to Bugzilla is the solution. One
of the good things about it at the moment is the lack of information required
from a person signing up for an account. We already have one unique token - the
email address.

One possibly-related point is that hopefully, at some point soon, the assignee
editbox will move up to where the text is now - above QA Contact - rather than
in the knob. (This will simplify the knob and make it possible to reassign while
doing other knob-related activities.) When this happens, assignee will become
like QA contact - just an email address.

CCs are already just email addresses. Therefore it seems to me that it makes
most sense to turn Reporter into:
<a href="email">email</a>
This would be consistent with all the others.

Gerv

Comment 5

[Christian Reis]

Well, not with the Assigned To: link, which includes both name and email.

One point to take into account is that having the reporter's name available
means we can be personal when asking questions (i.e., it's friendlier to say
"Mark, can you provide us with a testcase" than saying "mark84@yahoo, can ..."
or even "reporter, can" -- though the latter form is very common.

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

IMHO if the assignee text gets made into a link then it should be in the same
format as the comment links and not like the current reporter link.

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

> Well, not with the Assigned To: link, which includes both name and email.

But that's going to change, as I said in comment 4.

> One point to take into account is that having the reporter's name available
> means we can be personal when asking questions

True. Brainwave - why not make the real name available as a tooltip (title
attribute)? We could do this for all email links. In Mozilla, at least, this
even works for <option>s in select elements, i.e. the CC list. 

Would that please everyone?

Gerv

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Neil: the assignee will become like the QA contact is now - i.e. we'll change it
in-place rather than as some strange bolt-on to the status/resolution control knob.

Gerv

Comment 9

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Attachment: Patch v.1

This patch adds a real name tooltip to both the Reporter and QA contact. We
can't do it for CCs because we don't have access to that information in the
template at the moment. It changes the reporter text back to just the email
address.

Gerv

Comment 10

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Comment on attachment 144454 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v.1

Myk: what do you think?

Gerv

Comment 11

[Christian Reis]

Why not add the tooltip to Assigned To: while you're at it? When we change that
to an <input> it would be a matter of copying over the title="" attribute..

Comment 12

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Comment on attachment 144454 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v.1

We're already fairly consistent, in that we display real names for non-fields
(reporter, assignee, commenter) and email addresses for fields (CC, QA
contact).  Real names are friendlier than email addresses and are sometimes
used usefully to display status (i.e. "Myk Melez (not reading bug mail)"), so
we should continue to display them where possible, linkifying them to email
address as this bug suggests.

Comment 13

[Vlad Dascalu]

Comment on attachment 144454 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v.1

I agree with myk.

Comment 14

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Attachment: Patch v.2

Like this? Or did you want to change the assignee to just be a real name?

Gerv

Comment 15

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Comment on attachment 144910 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v.2

>Like this? Or did you want to change the assignee to just be a real name?

Yes, that's a good idea.  It'll go away when the assignee becomes a field, but
in the meantime that field will work better like the reporter field.


>-        <a href="mailto:[% bug.reporter.email FILTER html %]">
>-          [% bug.reporter.identity FILTER html %]</a>
>+        <a title="[% bug.reporter.email FILTER html %]" 
>+          href="mailto:[% bug.reporter.email FILTER html %]">
>+          [% bug.reporter.name FILTER html %]</a>

Now that the email address appears in the status bar when the user hovers over
or focuses the link we don't need it as a tooltip anymore.

As for the link text, we need to display the email address if the name isn't
set (as with commenters).  It may make sense to have another kind of identity
property on User objects that returns the name or email address but not both
(and which the commenters could use), but that's overkill for this fix.


>          <input name="qa_contact" accesskey="q"
>+                title="[% bug.qa_contact.name FILTER html %]"
>                 value="[% bug.qa_contact.email FILTER html %]" size="60">

My one concern about this is that the tooltip doesn't change when the field
gets updated.  Overall, though, since users rarely change this field, the
tooltip is still better.  Perhaps we should have some JavaScript that clears
the title attribute when the user changes the field (or even gets the new value
via an RPC call), but that's icing.

Comment 16

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

> Now that the email address appears in the status bar when the user hovers over
> or focuses the link we don't need it as a tooltip anymore.

Well, nothing wrong with having it. 

> As for the link text, we need to display the email address if the name isn't
> set (as with commenters).  It may make sense to have another kind of identity
> property on User objects that returns the name or email address but not both
> (and which the commenters could use), but that's overkill for this fix.

The name property actually does that - if there's no name, it gets set to the
email address. See the header of every comment on a page, for example.

So, is this patch OK, or does it need changing?

Gerv

Comment 17

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Myk: ping? What are we doing here, if anything?

Gerv

Comment 18

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

myk: re-ping, having CCed you?

Gerv

Comment 19

[Frédéric Buclin]

Fixed by bug 374020 in Bugzilla 3.2 and newer.