243944 - Support User Bios [biography,profile,information]

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: Extension Ideas, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Bill McGonigle (not currently reading bugmail; please contact directly)]

In bmo and other large collaborative projects I often have no idea who most
people are.  I'll see a comment on one of my bugs and have no idea whether it's
from sombody authoritative or a random kook.

If it's not a component owner, the best I can do is to search for existing bugs
with that person's e-mail and try to infer something from the search results. 
That's time consuming and inaccurate.

What would be better would be to have a page where each user can store a small
bio about who he is, what he works on, what his position is, etc.  It could be
linked where a username appears on a comment.  Either the link could be
re-pointed to this user bio page, which would in turn have a mailto link, or
there could be a [bio] link after the mailto.

Items on the page might include homepage url, links to owned components, bugs,
etc.  

Tangentially: some number of users have invalid addresses listed as an anti-spam
measure.  There could be a mechanism on the User Bio page where folks, say with
editbugs, could view a real/alternate e-mail address.  As it is now there's
often no way for a regular user to contact these people other than cluttering a bug.

Database wise, this should be pretty small.  We need a field for the freeform
bio, a large varchar, a homepage URL field, probably another large varchar, and
an alternate e-mail address, hopefully a smaller varchar (whatever the existing
schema is for e-mail addresses).  

GUI wise, data entry could be done in the 'Account Settings' tab of Prefs, any
pages where we render an account name/e-mail link would need to be touched, and
a new page would be made to render this information.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning bugs that I'm not actively working on to the default component owner
in order to try to make some sanity out of my personal buglist.  This doesn't
mean the bug isn't being dealt with, just that I'm not the one doing it.  If you
are dealing with this bug, please assign it to yourself.

Comment 3

[Ken Wesson]

(In reply to comment #2)
> *** Bug 662531 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I don't agree with this. They may be interrelated but they are not the same thing. One is an enhancement request regarding missing functionality; the other is a defect involving unexpected behavior of a UI element.

Comment 4

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

For what it's worth, we had a (small) talk about this this other day and the consensus was that this is probably extension territory.

Comment 5

[:glob ✱]

moving to the 'extension ideas' component.

bugzilla.mozilla.org has implemented this in our 'UserProfile' extension:
https://github.com/mozilla/webtools-bmo-bugzilla/tree/master/extensions/UserProfile

Comment 7

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Status field, displayed next to name

Currently, many people use the Real Name field to tell the world important things
about themselves. I have seen:
- 'I'm on vacation till ...'
- 'Not reading bugmail'
- 'Die marquee die' ;-)
- 'Looking for a job'
These are commonly added in round brackets after the real name. It is a pain,
because:
- It makes it rediculously long
- It can't be used for other purposes, where a shorter name for the user is
needed (like bug 181235).

Make a field, especially for these purposes. People should write in there a few
words which they want to let the world know. These would be shown prominently,
maybe even very similar to today, but we (bugzilla) would know what it is and
can ignore it for certain usages and adjust the HTML in others.

Comment 8

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Opps, sorry. The bio would be displayed on a separate page. That would fail the requirement that it's prominently displayed. A bio page is not useful for information like "On vacation until ..." or similar information pertinent to direct responses.
I've thus filed a specific bug about the status field.

xref related bugs:
* bug 1146124 - status field
* bug 1146127 - nickname field
* bug 338393 - Split Real Name into First/Last Name
* bug 372417 - custom profile fields (DUPed here)

Comment 9

[Tobias B. Besemer [:BesTo] (QA)]

Will linking back to Mozillians. A bio field would work for me.