TL;DR: Bugzilla restrictions block new contributors - that's worse than
spam.
Hi all,
A few weeks ago, because of a spam attack, access to bugzilla and
ability to report bugs and comment on bugs for new members was
restricted. New members now have to ask webmasters to be whilelisted and
allowed to interact with the community.
I've got some colleague who just registered and tried to contribute and
totally failed at it. The message about asking webmasters for whilelist
wasn't visible enough apparently so they didn't realize it was necessary
and just ended up with an account which seem unusable to them. So I had
to forward messages in their name:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=506244#c19
Moreover, in that case, we're speaking about someone working on
week-ends and is ready to contribute on week-ends, and I don't expect
webmasters to promptly react to whilelisting request on week-ends. So
even if the user would have sent a mail, it could have requested days to
be processed.
If I had not been there to assist my colleague in contributing, he'd
just had given up. And I'm pretty sure that several other people have
given up contributing since the introduction of this "ask for
permission" rule.
So IMO, the current state is by far worse than having spam. It makes the
community more difficult to join for new subscribers and appear more
closed than it is. A lot of effort were done in the past to "reduce
barriers" from users to contributors, and this Bugzilla thing goes to
the opposite direction.
Can we please have spam and new contributors again? And then consider
approaches that have worked for other tools to avoid spam? I don't get
why bugs.eclipse.org would be the only service for which reCaptcha
wouldn't work...
Cheers,
--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer for Red Hat Developers <http://developers.redhat.com>
My blog <http://mickaelistria.wordpress.com> - My Tweets
<http://twitter.com/mickaelistria>
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