285903 - Indicate by each comment whether the person is CCed

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: User Interface, defect)

Description

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Often, people comment on bugs without being CCed. People then reply to the
comment and expect the original commenter to see the reply, which they don't.

If we indicated on each comment (text change, background colour, icon, whatever)
whether the author was currently CCed or not, people would note that they had to
add them. For bonus points, there would be an easy way to CC the person
concerned by clicking something.

Gerv

Comment 1

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

This is a great idea.  I would just expand it to check not only the cc: list but
the other roles as well to determine if the user will receive additional
comments by mail.  This could be implemented as a toggle icon (i.e. icon with
two states) which you could click on to add someone to the cc: list and which
had a tooltip that explained it for users not yet familiar with its meaning.

Comment 2

[Stephen Lee]

This should also check if the user watches any user in any named role.

Also it needs to cover any saved queries that they regularly check which include
the bug in question (although perhaps not if it includes a large number of other
bugs), and could analyze whether it appears they created a bookmark to the bug
that's in a place they're likely to check any time soon, etc.

In short an AI using all available information for a statistical assessment of
the probability the commenter will see your reply within 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week,
ever. Some of this may also require a data-mining browser plugin.


(if you hadn't realised, the above is intended to point out a flaw in the
apparent assumption that anyone who doesn't get bugmail won't respond.)


Better IMHO would be a mechanism to specify that a comment is flagged for
attention of specific user(s). Depending on these users' prefs this might either
generate email (despite them not necessarily being otherwise mentioned on the
bug), or cause a banner to appear e.g. "[Bug 12345 has unread comments for
you]". (This banner might also be re-used for new comments on "interesting" bugs
after implementing Bug 176145, or for directed review requests etc.).

This mechanism might be invoked by default when you use the "Reply" link.

In fact come to think of it, it would be a bit like a review request but for a
comment rather than an attachment...

Comment 3

[Bill Barry]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Better IMHO would be a mechanism to specify that a comment is flagged for
> attention of specific user(s). Depending on these users' prefs this might either
> generate email (despite them not necessarily being otherwise mentioned on the
> bug), or cause a banner to appear e.g. "[Bug 12345 has unread comments for
> you]". (This banner might also be re-used for new comments on "interesting" bugs
> after implementing Bug 176145, or for directed review requests etc.).
> 
> This mechanism might be invoked by default when you use the "Reply" link.
> 
> In fact come to think of it, it would be a bit like a review request but for a
> comment rather than an attachment...

Better still, it could be triggered by the string "reply to comment #" in a similar manner to the linkification process