528685 - Add HTML and autolinking to add-on comments in collections

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Public Pages, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Wac]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5

I would like to discuss to extend the permission of using HTML and auto-linking to some other fields too.

1. Add-ons Reviews (User Reviews on that add-on)
HTML usage: Allow
(Auto-)linking: Disallow (or optimistically Allow *)

2. Collection comments (Owner comments on the add-on being added to that collection)
HTML usage: Allow
(Auto-)linking: Allow

* Just like how you want to format your review when you post on a forum/blog etc. Due to paranoia some may want to disallow linking/auto-linking. But I truly think it's a very low risk:
(1) Built-in protection exists already. Add-on installation in other domains are blocked automatically. A malicious user just can't make others slip-up and get infected. 
(2) A malicious user can paste a malicious plain-text link if he so wish to infect people. Disallow auto-linking doesn't help much. In reality I rarely see this happening. 
(3) As a case Mozillaline forum offers no such protection. Yet we haven't seen a lot of innocent users get infected by malicious addons simply because the forum doesn't protect them against malicious links. As a matter of fact rarely anyone post malicious addons to lure people in. Such protection is not really necessary. My two cents only.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Dave Garrett]

I'd like to avoid formatting of any kind in reviews, personally. It don't think it should be needed. As to links there, spam could be an issue, so autolinkifying is probably not best.

Collection comments makes sense to have the new features, though.

Comment 2

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

We can add it to collection comments. I don't think it should be in reviews though, both for spam reasons and I just don't want someone shouting in bold that the add-on doesn't work.

Comment 3

[Wac]

By the way, the use of HTML is not user-friendly. The average Joe just don't like to use it. That's what I observe in my blogs. Thus don't expect there is a big rise in use of formatting even if you enable it. For the computing forums that I'm active, people who like shouting or act childishly are usually those who know little about computing.

Shouting can be done in any way. WTF! THIS DAMN ADDON DOESN'T WORK!! Theoretically every tool can be used positively or negatively. Tools are neutral themselves so it really depends on the people who use it. If we believe the people who use it negatively is more than those who use positively, in other words the damages outweigh beneifts, then we should turn it off.

Regarding spam, as a sidenote, some commenting systems use rel="nofollow" to combat spams instead of "disallowing autolinking". By the way one can still spam the review section (by text links or other types of spammy contents) if he so wishes to do. Neither method helps. Personally I believe in people. People generally doing more good things than bad things (that's how the world improves, and how Wikipedia and open-source projects grow up ;). So I would worry less about spams (I can always turn it off again if it turns out to be really serious). My two cents worth. After all, turn off (auto)linking if you are still worried about it.

Comment 4

[Wac]

No new comment has been made for more than 2 weeks. I think it's time for the person-in-charge to read the above comments, make a final decision and close that bug. Thank you for your kind attention.

Comment 5

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

My final decision was in comment #2. We'll add autolinking to collection comments when we can fit it into a release. It's not a high priority.