Bugzilla as a discussion forum

[Christian Robottom Reis]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 09:36:56PM +0000, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Christian Robottom Reis wrote:
> >but there are three things that off the top
> >of my head I do think could improve the situation:
> >
> >    - Specifying "Comment types", which would allow us to categorize
> >      comments -- there's a bug and patch for this open. This opens a
> >      lot of nice possibilities for queries and historical analysis
> >      later.
> 
> Does this include negative/perjorative comment types ("irrelevant", 
> "troll" etc.)? If so, this is bound to generate a massive amount of 
> argument and bad feeling, as people mark and unmark particular comments. 
> And in a closed Bugzilla, such types would be useless anyway.

Not necessarily, and most probably not. But it would be nice to have
something like "Reporter comment", "QA comment", "Assignee comment"
because you can expect those parties won't be just adding random noise
to the discussion.

Your examples below are spot-on too.

> I can see the virtue of "this comment was added with a patch", and "this 
> comment was added as a mass change", and that sort of thing.

[...]

> >    - Allowing comments to be marked as "irrelevant" -- poor man's
> >      moderation, I guess.
> 
> With all the inherent disadvantages of that.

Well, not all the disadvantages -- just mark it as irrelevant and get it
hidden by default; yeah, you could get whining for that, but perhaps not
as much as with a full-blown moderation system.

> >    Both features would be restricted by privilege (perhaps editbugs,
> >    perhaps something different)
> >
> >    - Timeless' proposed "block bug" feature.
> 
> When it comes down to it, I think we may be trying to solve what is 
> really a minor problem here. As you said, there are very few bugs that 

Yeah, agreed. It's bad on some bugs in BMO because, well, BMO has too
many [too vocal] users (and perhaps not enough punishment handed out
IMO). Timeless feature would mitigate this problem, but if it was so
important someone would have went out and coded it by now, right? :-)

Take care,
--
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 261 2331