David Coppit wrote:
> So here's my proposal: hype the bug voting some! Stick it on the main
> mozilla page along side the bugzilla link. And integrate number of votes
> in along with the talkback crash data, or at least keep a link to the
> search page with the highest voted bugs/features.
I think that while it's true that the voting system hasn't achieved as
much as I thought it would when I first proposed it, I'm not sure it has
been as useless as some people have said it is.
Firstly, it's really hard to determine who is using the votes. As a
member of the Bugzilla team I try and take the votes of bugs in the
Bugzilla product into account (but this is probably not obvious), but as
you've touched on, there's a lot more issues. For example, votes mainly
go to enhancements and not bugs, but bugs should be given higher
priorities in general.
Then you've got the fact that Mozilla still has not achieved N4 parity
in various areas. Although it's obviously surpassed it in some, Mozilla
still has too many bugs, too many perf problems and too many missing N4
features. Hence we haven't really got to the stage where we can say the
Netscape engineers are looking to see what features they might
implement.
One benefit of votes - although not the intended one - is that other
people can see the major issues that are affecting users in the product.
And let's not forget that Bugzilla as a piece of software is used on
many installations. For example, open source projects that use Bugzilla
don't have other channels of (possibly paying) customer feedback, so
voting could be their only feedback.
Regarding highlighting votes, I think we could certainly do more. Bugs
like bug #15967, bug #15806 and a generalisation of bug #36013 to votes
count help here.
I don't have any ideas at the moment about how it could be improved, but
if you can think of anything else, feel free to file them as bugs
against the Bugzilla component of the Webtools product.
--
Matthew Tuck: Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy
My Short Autobiography: 1985 Grade Bin Monitor 1990 Class Clown Award
1992 Awarded Most Likely To Spontaneously Combust 1996 Crowned Galactic
Emperor 1998 Released From Smith Psychiatric Hospital
