Thanks for all the input on this feature. This was a good discussion. Here's what I've learned:
* Almost no one makes decisions based on the number of votes (Thunderbird and related may be an exception). ** Ergo, most users voting on bugs are probably being misled into thinking their vote accomplishes anything. * There is an idea that it cuts down on "me too" comments, but there's no hard evidence. BMO also has more ways to hide or stop commenting and to otherwise prevent abuse than it did a few years ago. * Some people use voting as a way to silently CC themselves onto bugs, i.e., to not trigger CC mail (but see my aside below). * Some people are using voting to keep track of bugs without getting much or any bugmail, presumably by unchecking most or all of the "Voter" column in Email Preferences. (Aside: the default for new users is to only get CC mail if you are the reporter. Admittedly this can still be annoying, it's not immediately obvious how to disable it, and the value of notifications on CC changes is highly questionable.) Thus it sounds like Voting is almost never used for its intended purpose and could be actively misleading users. However, it also sounds like people have discovered interesting alternative uses for it that could be made more explicit, intuitive, and discoverable. I think we can cut out Voting and enhance other features along these lines: * Change bug tagging to something like "favouriting" (or a word with less contentious spelling ;). Rework the UI to provide an obvious way to both favourite a bug and to see your favourites list. * Further improve it to only display updates since you last looked at the list, something like the "Updated Since Last Visit" feature in My Dashboard. Ideally this would eliminate the need to get any bugmail about favourites, but we *could* add it to the email preferences, defaulting to no bugmail (I'd prefer to just rely on a dashboard, though). * Turn off CC notifications entirely, with the possible exception of when someone else CCs you on a bug. * After those are in place, turn Voting off for most if not all products. Unless there are strong objections, we'll look into this in Q3. I realize this is not a huge change, but it's yet another step to make Bugzilla easier to use, particularly for new users. Look out for more posts like this in the future. Thanks, Mark _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
