338395 - Users need to be able to nickname other users

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: User Accounts, enhancement)

Description

[timeless]

problem:
bugzilla doesn't scale well enough for my tastes in large corporate environments. Imagine you encounter a system which has thousands of users who have common or hard to remember first/last names, and imagine that the system doesn't include nick names for people.

you're introduced to these people by their nick names, and you'd like to be able to quickly assign or cc based on the only thing you know about people, their nick names.

the actual results are you get lists like:
Instead, you're constantly presented with these useless lists of everyone's formal names which are meaningless.

expected results:
Each user should have the ability to attach a nick name to each other user. The nick name should persist even if the user account changes its name (any name field). It might be worth a little note in the editing field for the nicknames set to warn people when a nicknamed account has had its naming bits changed. This would allow me to create a nickname "triage-browser" and attach it to say "gavin", and if gavin changes his real name to "on vacation", then when i look through my nick name list i'd see a warning that his names have changed and i'd decide that i need to change the "triage-browser" nickname to point to someone else. (This is more useful once there are organization fields associated with users so that if a user changes organizations you would know to reconisder the nickname.)

I know this sounds like a lot of storage space, but on average I doubt people will assign more than 20 nicknames (whether this is a hard limit [db arch/design] or a soft limit, i don't really care], in my group I can't imagine doing more. It should be moderately hard for me to assign a nickname to discourage me from spending large amounts of database resources just naming every user in the database.

If people really are afraid of this feature, it could have a param to disable it, but i'd rather it didn't. I really want this feature, and I really want it for each and every bugzilla I've ever used. This enables me to pick names and survive email address changes.

it might be worth adding a special feature for it for places where bugzillas uses edit fields, namely:

nick:bz / nick:gavin would be guaranteed to only autoselect from your nickname list. So if only one account in the database has a real name that includes "nick:gavins" and you don't have a nick for "gavins", and you type "nick:gavins" into the edit field, it gives you a multiselect list instead of automatically selecting that item. This is to protect people from accidentally poking the wrong person.

Comment 1

[Enrico Weigelt]

So, you suggest an kind of friend list ? 
This I what I'd like to have, too :)

I was just about filing an request for an nickname ability, so we don't have to type long names (email addrs) every time, but I didn't think about giving each user its own namespace yet. Your suggestion seems to be even better.

There should be an drop-down list on every form which has an asignee field (ie. the "enter new bug" form) and some quick link to an page for editing the list (maybe w/ target="_edit_friends").

I'll vote on this.

Comment 2

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

It would be more logical for people to assign themselves nicknames.