Re: Voting in BMO
On 10/06/2015 05:24, Xidorn Quan wrote: On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 9:09 AM, Mark Côté mc...@mozilla.com wrote: To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. I'll vote not to remove voting. Although I don't see it is used to prioritize features or fixes, I feel it is still a good channel to know what users want without letting them spam in comments. That doesn't work in that a high number of votes currently has no effect on whether a bug gets fixed or not. Because developers never pay any attention to that field (well OK *I* don't pay any attention that field). I suggest that this feature be removed so that people don't have the misplaced assumption that voting for a bug will get it fixed faster. Alternatively if the decision is to keep this feature, someone should periodically go through bugs with large number of votes and decide whether to fast track or deep six each bug. Phil -- Philip Chee phi...@aleytys.pc.my, philip.c...@gmail.com http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief, oh Night, and so be good for us to pass. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 13/06/2015 05:43, Robert Kaiser wrote: Mark Côté schrieb: * 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. I actually think that tagging is an established way to call such a feature, but we could have a like or want tag or so that's easy to add, and the whole tagging UI needs a whole lot of rework (it's really cumbersome to use - and I am using it quite a bit). Bug 666 wants to be your friend. +--+ +--+ |Accept| |Reject| +--+ +--+ Phil -- Philip Chee phi...@aleytys.pc.my, philip.c...@gmail.com http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief, oh Night, and so be good for us to pass. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
Mark Côté schrieb: * 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. I actually think that tagging is an established way to call such a feature, but we could have a like or want tag or so that's easy to add, and the whole tagging UI needs a whole lot of rework (it's really cumbersome to use - and I am using it quite a bit). KaiRo ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 09/06/15 23:07, Mark Côté wrote: I would ask, then, what the purpose of the feature is. If we know it isn't used to make decisions, why use it? The only thing I can think of is as a sort of spam honeypot, to get people to not +1 or me too bugs, but this seems strange at best and actively misleading at worst. It used to do this job extremely well; I have no information on how true that is today, as developers seem rather free to say actually, we ignore votes... Gerv ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
Here's something to consider. I've seen my friend Jen Simmons encourage people to use voting as a way to tell us that it's important to them for Firefox to support a particular html or css feature. Here's a recent example https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/601184865732534272 - the bug mentioned has 41 votes on it. I just did a little looking around and other than adding a comment to the relevant bug the only other method of giving us feedback seems to be to dump it in https://input.mozilla.org/feedback/firefox Maybe it's moot because we're not influenced by votes but if you're not a mozilla insider how do express support for something without spamming the bug? - Michael On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Gervase Markham g...@mozilla.org wrote: On 09/06/15 23:07, Mark Côté wrote: I would ask, then, what the purpose of the feature is. If we know it isn't used to make decisions, why use it? The only thing I can think of is as a sort of spam honeypot, to get people to not +1 or me too bugs, but this seems strange at best and actively misleading at worst. It used to do this job extremely well; I have no information on how true that is today, as developers seem rather free to say actually, we ignore votes... Gerv ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform -- Michael Verdi • blog.mozilla.org/verdi • irc: verdi ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
I agree. While it is certainly true that prioritizing work based on how many noisy people are campaigning for it is not a good idea, I reject the notion that the only useful goal here is to prevent bugspam, as that implies that user input is worthless. me too/+1 comments on bugs are clearly not the way to collect user input. Votes aren't a whole lot better. input.mozilla.org is good for certain things, but the SNR is too low to use it raw and the cost of meaningful processing is high. If I were to handwave up a new mechanism to replace bug comments + voting, I'd probably want a feature/bug page with - upvote/downvote counts (3 vs 100 is useful information, even if it doesn't decide anything on its own) - list of *distinct* reasons for wanting it - counterarguments and data (eg web compat info) - pointer to the appropriate discussion forum and threads The idea is that if someone merely wants to support a feature request but doesn't have any new arguments for why, they can upvote it and be done. But if someone *does* have a novel argument, they can add it to the list. Or expand/clarify an existing reason instead of just appending. Come to think of it, that sounds like a wiki talk page with a fixed format. Perhaps we could just throw up a template page on wiki.m.o and find a good namespace for these, and redirect voters there? On 06/11/2015 10:22 AM, Michael Verdi wrote: Here's something to consider. I've seen my friend Jen Simmons encourage people to use voting as a way to tell us that it's important to them for Firefox to support a particular html or css feature. Here's a recent example https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/601184865732534272 - the bug mentioned has 41 votes on it. I just did a little looking around and other than adding a comment to the relevant bug the only other method of giving us feedback seems to be to dump it in https://input.mozilla.org/feedback/firefox Maybe it's moot because we're not influenced by votes but if you're not a mozilla insider how do express support for something without spamming the bug? - Michael On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Gervase Markham g...@mozilla.org wrote: On 09/06/15 23:07, Mark Côté wrote: I would ask, then, what the purpose of the feature is. If we know it isn't used to make decisions, why use it? The only thing I can think of is as a sort of spam honeypot, to get people to not +1 or me too bugs, but this seems strange at best and actively misleading at worst. It used to do this job extremely well; I have no information on how true that is today, as developers seem rather free to say actually, we ignore votes... Gerv ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
DevTools does something like this with UserVoice. I don't think we should get rid of voting unless we replace it with something else (UserVoice is a good alternative). There are plenty of people that recommend others to vote on bugs that they want prioritized, and us removing voting will make it look to the outsider that Mozilla is becoming more closed. Cheers, Jared On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 2:13 PM, Steve Fink sf...@mozilla.com wrote: I agree. While it is certainly true that prioritizing work based on how many noisy people are campaigning for it is not a good idea, I reject the notion that the only useful goal here is to prevent bugspam, as that implies that user input is worthless. me too/+1 comments on bugs are clearly not the way to collect user input. Votes aren't a whole lot better. input.mozilla.org is good for certain things, but the SNR is too low to use it raw and the cost of meaningful processing is high. If I were to handwave up a new mechanism to replace bug comments + voting, I'd probably want a feature/bug page with - upvote/downvote counts (3 vs 100 is useful information, even if it doesn't decide anything on its own) - list of *distinct* reasons for wanting it - counterarguments and data (eg web compat info) - pointer to the appropriate discussion forum and threads The idea is that if someone merely wants to support a feature request but doesn't have any new arguments for why, they can upvote it and be done. But if someone *does* have a novel argument, they can add it to the list. Or expand/clarify an existing reason instead of just appending. Come to think of it, that sounds like a wiki talk page with a fixed format. Perhaps we could just throw up a template page on wiki.m.o and find a good namespace for these, and redirect voters there? On 06/11/2015 10:22 AM, Michael Verdi wrote: Here's something to consider. I've seen my friend Jen Simmons encourage people to use voting as a way to tell us that it's important to them for Firefox to support a particular html or css feature. Here's a recent example https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/601184865732534272 - the bug mentioned has 41 votes on it. I just did a little looking around and other than adding a comment to the relevant bug the only other method of giving us feedback seems to be to dump it in https://input.mozilla.org/feedback/firefox Maybe it's moot because we're not influenced by votes but if you're not a mozilla insider how do express support for something without spamming the bug? - Michael On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Gervase Markham g...@mozilla.org wrote: On 09/06/15 23:07, Mark Côté wrote: I would ask, then, what the purpose of the feature is. If we know it isn't used to make decisions, why use it? The only thing I can think of is as a sort of spam honeypot, to get people to not +1 or me too bugs, but this seems strange at best and actively misleading at worst. It used to do this job extremely well; I have no information on how true that is today, as developers seem rather free to say actually, we ignore votes... Gerv ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 2015-06-11 2:51 PM, Jared Wein wrote: DevTools does something like this with UserVoice. I don't think we should get rid of voting unless we replace it with something else (UserVoice is a good alternative). There are plenty of people that recommend others to vote on bugs that they want prioritized, and us removing voting will make it look to the outsider that Mozilla is becoming more closed. Well, but in most components, such recommendations are misleading since developers pay little if any attention to votes. Personally I'd prefer to not be redirected to /dev/null. :-) ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/11/2015 11:51 AM, Jared Wein wrote: There are plenty of people that recommend others to vote on bugs that they want prioritized, and us removing voting will make it look to the outsider that Mozilla is becoming more closed. If ignoring votes is a sign the Mozilla is closed, and there is a value that Mozilla be open, I keep wondering if the real problem here is that Mozilla is, in fact, too closed, and ignoring votes is one evidence of that. Maybe the correct fix is to start paying attention to votes. :rkent ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 2015-06-11 3:48 PM, R Kent James wrote: Maybe the correct fix is to start paying attention to votes. If you choose your project priorities based on internet voting, you're gonna have a bad time. The word vote implies that the act of voting has a direct effect on the outcome, which is clearly not the case here and really shouldn't be. But that's probably the root of a lot of community frustration. I definitely think that we need a low-friction, community-facing way to express interest in a bug's outcome - maybe a list the only CC's participants on status changes, but not on new comments? - but as it stands voting isn't the right thing. - mhoye ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Mike Hoye mh...@mozilla.com wrote: On 2015-06-11 3:48 PM, R Kent James wrote: Maybe the correct fix is to start paying attention to votes. If you choose your project priorities based on internet voting, you're gonna have a bad time. The word vote implies that the act of voting has a direct effect on the outcome, I don't see is anything in the definition that implies direct effect http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vote most of that is around the idea that a vote is an expression of opinion or preference. Seems like we don't need to, and haven't in many cases, implemented features or fixes with lots of votes but they at least deserve some kind of response due to the high level of interest, and that's generally what happens. There are a few of us still round from the origin of many of these bugzilla features and for this one I think it was mostly just intended as a mechanism to make sure we had some ways to get a good collection of eyeballs on a particular issue where lots of people shared the same experience or ideas, and to make sure at least some kind of response was in place that explained the reason for doing, or not doing, some course of action. Based on that you might come away with a different opinion that voting was working and serving a valuable service in its most simple form. Its it just the case that we need to make it more clear that a vote means vote for this bug to get more people looking at and discussing this bug? It seems like the original proposal was to try and cut down on bugzilla features with the idea of trying to remove and simplify. Now its turned into yeah, there is something here that people want to be able to do here, but voting is not quite it, and it might deserve more investigation and feature work to really solve the real problem. That seems like its leading more towards taking something simple like the voting feature we have now and turning it into something more complex. That's an interesting turn in the discussion and something you are likely to run into as you try to examine more bugzilla features. -chofmann which is clearly not the case here and really shouldn't be. But that's probably the root of a lot of community frustration. I definitely think that we need a low-friction, community-facing way to express interest in a bug's outcome - maybe a list the only CC's participants on status changes, but not on new comments? - but as it stands voting isn't the right thing. - mhoye ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On Thursday 2015-06-11 11:13 -0700, Steve Fink wrote: If I were to handwave up a new mechanism to replace bug comments + voting, I'd probably want a feature/bug page with - upvote/downvote counts (3 vs 100 is useful information, even if it doesn't decide anything on its own) - list of *distinct* reasons for wanting it - counterarguments and data (eg web compat info) - pointer to the appropriate discussion forum and threads For what it's worth, I'd pay more attention to votes if I could see the graph of how vote counts changed over time. I'd be much more inclined to believe votes that have increased steadily over time (from people independently deciding that something was important) than votes that increased in big jumps (because one person decided that it was important and did a good job of convincing others to vote for the bug). I have occasionally looked at the list of most-voted-for bugs to see if there were important things to prioritize that we were forgetting about, but it's probably been a few years since I've done so. -David -- 턞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 턂 턢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 턂 Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914) signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/11/15 10:18 PM, Mike Hoye wrote: On 2015-06-11 3:48 PM, R Kent James wrote: Maybe the correct fix is to start paying attention to votes. If you choose your project priorities based on internet voting, you're gonna have a bad time. I don't think its about the complete list of project priorities, certainly there are lots of issues that need to be done that users won't vote for. I do think that at least once in a while it is good to rely on votes for bringing features to the product that users want. This does not strictly mean that you'd pick the very top item on the list, but work your way down the list until you find something that users want and fits into the general direction the project is heading in. Philipp ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 2015-06-11 4:46 PM, Chris Hofmann wrote: On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Mike Hoye mh...@mozilla.com wrote: On 2015-06-11 3:48 PM, R Kent James wrote: Maybe the correct fix is to start paying attention to votes. If you choose your project priorities based on internet voting, you're gonna have a bad time. The word vote implies that the act of voting has a direct effect on the outcome, I don't see is anything in the definition that implies direct effect http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vote most of that is around the idea that a vote is an expression of opinion or preference. Seems like we don't need to, and haven't in many cases, implemented features or fixes with lots of votes but they at least deserve some kind of response due to the high level of interest, and that's generally what happens. There are a few of us still round from the origin of many of these bugzilla features and for this one I think it was mostly just intended as a mechanism to make sure we had some ways to get a good collection of eyeballs on a particular issue where lots of people shared the same experience or ideas, and to make sure at least some kind of response was in place that explained the reason for doing, or not doing, some course of action. Based on that you might come away with a different opinion that voting was working and serving a valuable service in its most simple form. Its it just the case that we need to make it more clear that a vote means vote for this bug to get more people looking at and discussing this bug? The original intention for voting doesn't seem to be widely understood or respected, as I believe you are saying. So we either need to somehow communicate this intention more widely, or abandon it. Unless someone is going to step up for the former, I would go with the latter. Furthermore, since bugs with lots of votes also have lots of CCs (see an earlier post of mine), if we want to just acknowledge that a bug is popular, we can just use CC counts above a certain threshold. Admittedly there's no way to search for that, but it wouldn't be hard to add. It seems like the original proposal was to try and cut down on bugzilla features with the idea of trying to remove and simplify. Now its turned into yeah, there is something here that people want to be able to do here, but voting is not quite it, and it might deserve more investigation and feature work to really solve the real problem. That seems like its leading more towards taking something simple like the voting feature we have now and turning it into something more complex. That's an interesting turn in the discussion and something you are likely to run into as you try to examine more bugzilla features. My plan is not to transform something simple into something complex. I still think we can ditch voting. What I am proposing is taking an existing feature--bug tagging--which is not widely used (too complex, not discoverable) and make it simpler and better to replace the strange misuse of voting that has arisen (watching bugs without email, that is, creating a favourites list). In addition, I want to turn off most CC notifications. That's going to be one of my strategies for examining Bugzilla features--figuring out where can we combine and simplify features, and where we can replace a useless or misused feature with something more obvious. Mark ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 2:38 PM, Mark Côté mc...@mozilla.com wrote: There are a few of us still round from the origin of many of these bugzilla features and for this one I think it was mostly just intended as a mechanism to make sure we had some ways to get a good collection of eyeballs on a particular issue where lots of people shared the same experience or ideas, and to make sure at least some kind of response was in place that explained the reason for doing, or not doing, some course of action. Based on that you might come away with a different opinion that voting was working and serving a valuable service in its most simple form. Its it just the case that we need to make it more clear that a vote means vote for this bug to get more people looking at and discussing this bug? The original intention for voting doesn't seem to be widely understood or respected, as I believe you are saying. So we either need to somehow communicate this intention more widely, or abandon it. Unless someone is going to step up for the former, I would go with the latter. Seems like a pretty simple change to just add text around the vote link/button change: (vote https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=voting/user.htmlbug_id=984012#vote_984012 ) to (vote to help raise visablity https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=voting/user.htmlbug_id=984012#vote_984012 ) Furthermore, since bugs with lots of votes also have lots of CCs (see an earlier post of mine), if we want to just acknowledge that a bug is popular, we can just use CC counts above a certain threshold. Admittedly there's no way to search for that, but it wouldn't be hard to add. yeah, it seem reasonable that there might be correlation between votes and cc lists at some steady state of the bug. one interesting question is which one is the leading indicator and which one is the lagging indicator. 1) do people add to the cc list as the result of finding bugs with rising vote counts? or 2) is the reverse happening that we have bugs with with big cc lists in which people then start voting on. or 3) is the growth in both uniform for bugs with large vote counts? If its 1 (or maybe 3) then the system is working pretty much as originally designed. If its the later then votes might be just piling on and we can leverage other indicators to give us the same info. does the action of a vote currently add one to the cc list by default? the ability to follow components and people also came after voting and might also lead to a disconnect between how many people are on the cc list of a random bug that comes in and starts to get voted up. that could be valuable for new features that have just been added that might get votes, but the component does not yet have a big component following. -chofmann ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
I would like to vote for voting. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 2015-06-11 6:43 PM, Chris Hofmann wrote: Furthermore, since bugs with lots of votes also have lots of CCs (see an earlier post of mine), if we want to just acknowledge that a bug is popular, we can just use CC counts above a certain threshold. Admittedly there's no way to search for that, but it wouldn't be hard to add. yeah, it seem reasonable that there might be correlation between votes and cc lists at some steady state of the bug. one interesting question is which one is the leading indicator and which one is the lagging indicator. Unfortunately we don't keep voting history, so that would be hard to tell. Here are a few more stats though: For the combined products Core, Firefox, and Firefox for Android, there are currently * 81 234 open bugs * 337 open bugs with greater than 25 votes. * 4 of those were opened within the last year. * of the top 10, the most recent was opened in 2005. 6 were opened sometime in the year 2000 or earlier. In the last 6 months, there were * 20 129 bugs resolved. * 11 154 of those resolved fixed. * 11 of those had 25 or more votes, although one was reopened. Of the other 10, half were fixed, two were duped, and 1 each invalid, wontfix, and incomplete. * the creation dates of the 10 resolved bugs ranges is scattered, with two opened within the last year, and they were resolved invalid and duplicate. Of the fixed bugs, they were opened in 2011, 2011, 2010, 2004, and 2000. I get the point about acknowledging votes. But what value does that really provide when (a) the number of highly voted bugs is actually rather small, (b) the number of highly voted bugs that we close in a 6-month period is miniscule, and (c) the closed bugs range from 4 to 15 years old. In that light, these acknowledgements seem disingenuous. Sure, this feature gives a little insight into a small number of issues that a small number of users care about, but how much weight should we give that compared to other forms of feedback, user research, and marketing? The presence of this feature in Bugzilla implies it is weighted much higher than it really is. I think we've outgrown its usefulness. Mark (Anecdote: bug 35168 was one of those 10 bugs resolved in the last 6 months. It was opened in 2000. It seems that what finally prompted it to be fixed was that Chrome does it properly.) ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/11/2015 3:57 PM, L. David Baron wrote: For what it's worth, I'd pay more attention to votes if I could see the graph of how vote counts changed over time. I explicitly want to call out attention to this. In my experience, it's not the absolute vote count that matters but rather the vote velocity. -- Joshua Cranmer Thunderbird and DXR developer Source code archæologist ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 3:49 AM, Ehsan Akhgari ehsan.akhg...@gmail.com wrote: On 2015-06-11 2:51 PM, Jared Wein wrote: DevTools does something like this with UserVoice. I don't think we should get rid of voting unless we replace it with something else (UserVoice is a good alternative). There are plenty of people that recommend others to vote on bugs that they want prioritized, and us removing voting will make it look to the outsider that Mozilla is becoming more closed. Well, but in most components, such recommendations are misleading since developers pay little if any attention to votes. Personally I'd prefer to not be redirected to /dev/null. :-) Indeed. It feels pretty dishonest of us to keep a voting feature that isn't payed attention to. I also don't think it works as a way to stop people from adding '+1' comments. All bugs that I've seen that get enough votes that +1 comments would have been distracting, *also* get enough +1 comments that the bug effectively becomes useless. / Jonas ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Mike Hoye mh...@mozilla.com wrote: The word vote implies that the act of voting has a direct effect on the outcome, which is clearly not the case here and really shouldn't be. But that's probably the root of a lot of community frustration. Forums like Reddit and StackOverflow use upvoting to great benefit. If you think it's a democratic vote that has a specified result if you win then you'll be disappointed; if you realize it's the same thing as various other site's ways to express interest/support then it starts to make more sense. I definitely don't think votes should dictate what we implement, but I also think Mozilla should pay more attention to votes than we do. They flag pain points. The picture would be clearer if we had downvotes too (e.g. the previously mentioned MNG bug would paint a different picture if you could see it's really contentious rather than really popular). -Dan Veditz ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/9/15 11:09 PM, Mark Côté wrote: To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. I have actually used votes in the past to aid decision making on what feature to implement next. I am aware that votes will not tell me how severe a normal bug is, but it does allow for prioritization of enhancement bugs in moments where you think ok, so what feature would the user like to see next... I could live without this feature if the number of people on CC gives some indication of how wanted a feature may be. Can you check correlation between the number of votes and the number of people on CC? Philipp ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
Original-Nachricht Betreff: Voting in BMO Von: Mark Côté mc...@mozilla.com An: Datum: 2015-06-09 23:09 To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. Thanks, Mark That would leave only relationship role to a bug (CC) which everybody can use. I use CC for bugs where I have to read the comments and votes where I am only interested if the status or dependency tree changes. If I always have to CC myself, the increased bug mail count will make reading bug mail more time consuming. Sebastian ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 11:09 PM, Mark Côté mc...@mozilla.com wrote: To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. Perhaps a good solution would be to morph voting into a less complex feature. I.e., it could be more like GitHub stars, where you have a way to note your interest without retrieving regular updates; just a binary state for every user/issue, with a single clickable UI element. Similarly, I could imagine that the very explicit CC list could be changed to be more like a Follow button, plus a (simplified) way to include others for those who have relevant privileges. Cheers, Dirkjan ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
Regarding CC instead of voting, there is another issue. Voting is not enabled in every component, so on these bugs I add me to the CC list. But sometimes it happens that a bug will be marked as confidential after I added me to the CC list. In that case I have still access to the not public bug. This cannot happen with votes. It already happened more than one time. ;) ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/10/15 1:24 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote: Similarly, I could imagine that the very explicit CC list could be changed to be more like a Follow button, plus a (simplified) way to include others for those who have relevant privileges. Have you seen the experimental bugzilla UI? It has a follow button. https://globau.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/bmo-new-look/ Philipp ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 2015-06-10 3:55 AM, Mark Banner wrote: Replying to this got me thinking - what about changing vote to I have this issue similar to support.mozilla.org. However, I think the usefulness would end up in the same way as voting. As a suggestion though, how about adding something near the comment box - like a checkbox or button which says I have this issue and wish to receive updates about it. If it was a checkbox, it could disable the comment box. For what it's worth, I think that the combination of this and disabling notification for cc changes is a pretty strong idea, even if doesn't quite achieve the holy grail of feature removal. - mhoye ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 09/06/2015 23:19, R Kent James wrote: Without voting, how do you direct users to express an interest in seeing a bug solved without adding a me too comment? Maybe the answer is that we don't. We just need to be honest - it would be very difficult to create a fair system that could be used in a valid way. Allowing votes by users that then don't actually get looked at or considered, is just misleading the user who's taken the time to create an account, sign-in and then vote. Replying to this got me thinking - what about changing vote to I have this issue similar to support.mozilla.org. However, I think the usefulness would end up in the same way as voting. As a suggestion though, how about adding something near the comment box - like a checkbox or button which says I have this issue and wish to receive updates about it. If it was a checkbox, it could disable the comment box. I'm not sure if that could also be misleading, but the intention would be to add an option for a user to give them something other than just the comment box - which at the moment, is the only real obvious associate me with this bug option. Mark. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 2015-06-09 11:58 PM, Wayne wrote: That said, there are much bigger issues with Bugzilla's UI, and removing voting is probably the smallest possible improvement. But it's probably easy to just disable it for a while, and see what happens? I never have seen the voting UI as being the least bit distracting. So I'd completely agree, other things in the UI are FAR more deserving of attention and discussion. Just imagine the fun we're going to have when we bring up changing or removing anything decidedly less trivial. :D In all seriousness, this thread has brought up a number of interesting points. Removing the feature may have been my original goal, but now I'm realizing the strange ways that some features are (mis)used, and that some of our existing features should be reoriented slightly to be made better. This has been good user research. Mark ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
Philipp Kewisch schrieb: I could live without this feature if the number of people on CC gives some indication of how wanted a feature may be. Well, I tend to CC myself to thing I seriously do not want to change but really want to be informed about when they actually get done. I wouldn't use votes for that. ;-) KaiRo ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 05:37:03PM -0400, Mark Côté wrote: 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. Note, I think it's perfectly fine to still mention CCs in bugmail when there is an accompanying comment, at least when the CC is not the person who comments (in which case it's more than fine, it's possibly useful). Mike ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
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
Re: Voting in BMO
On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 9:37 AM, Mark Côté mc...@mozilla.com wrote: * 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. ... * After those are in place, turn Voting off for most if not all products. It seems to be a good plan. I guess it would be great if you could migrate all votes to favorite when you cut down Voting. - Xidorn ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/9/15 2:09 PM, Mark Côté wrote: In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map, over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down at least a bit if I can. To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's real CC list. chris ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 9:09 AM, Mark Côté mc...@mozilla.com wrote: In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map, over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down at least a bit if I can. That sounds good. To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. I'll vote not to remove voting. Although I don't see it is used to prioritize features or fixes, I feel it is still a good channel to know what users want without letting them spam in comments. Conversely, I suggest we move back the link to My Votes somewhere, so that we can get to that page more easily. - Xidorn ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Voting in BMO
In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map, over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down at least a bit if I can. To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. Thanks, Mark ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
We don't use bugzilla votes as a strong signal for prioritization on devtools. We do actually keep an eye on votes in some other channels ( ffdevtools.uservoice.com), but I don't think anyone on devtools would object strongly to votes going away in bugzilla. -dave On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 3:48 PM, Axel Hecht l...@mozilla.com wrote: I recall that at least one group actively uses votes to prioritize stuff. I can't really tell which one, I'm leaning towards devtools, but I don't have any data to back that up. I mostly remember because I was surprised. Also, for a component like devtools, I can see how it'd make sense. Axel On 6/10/15 12:09 AM, Mark Côté wrote: In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map, over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down at least a bit if I can. To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. Thanks, Mark ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
I recall that at least one group actively uses votes to prioritize stuff. I can't really tell which one, I'm leaning towards devtools, but I don't have any data to back that up. I mostly remember because I was surprised. Also, for a component like devtools, I can see how it'd make sense. Axel On 6/10/15 12:09 AM, Mark Côté wrote: In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map, over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down at least a bit if I can. To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. Thanks, Mark ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 09.06.15 23:24, Chris Peterson wrote: I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's real CC list. Same here. Removing the voting feature means that I will cause a lot of email spam in the future. :) I have currently 2271 active votes, I add almost every day new votes or remove my votes from fixed bugs. I use the voting feature as subscribtion feature. ;) ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 2015-06-09 5:39 PM, Sören Hentzschel wrote: On 09.06.15 23:24, Chris Peterson wrote: I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's real CC list. Same here. Removing the voting feature means that I will cause a lot of email spam in the future. :) I have currently 2271 active votes, I add almost every day new votes or remove my votes from fixed bugs. I use the voting feature as subscribtion feature. ;) So, this is a separate issue--whether users should get CC notifications by default (you can turn them off right now in at least a couple different ways). Keeping voting around just as a way to CC yourself quietly seems suboptimal. Mark ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/9/15 2:24 PM, Chris Peterson wrote: I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's real CC list. I think if Bugzilla, with its long and complex history, ever has a hope of being untangled into something better, we can't keep every feature because of all the possible ways it might be used. :) Here, I'd suggest that the default should be to _not_ send emails for CC changes, unless a user opts into it (and maybe even not even for that, it's just spammy for anyone managing lots of bugs. But baby steps...). Net improvement, no matter what happens with voting. I'd agree that voting could be removed. Most people know that it was added as a way to counter +1! type comments. But I'd counter that (1) it's unclear that it's very effective in that role and (2) I've rarely actually seen people telling people to use voting. We have better tools now with the ability to tag and hide comments (https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/comment_tagging) which I _do_ see used frequently, as well as the ability to entirely disable commenting on bugs in extenuating circumstances. I'd like to see those further improved. That said, there are much bigger issues with Bugzilla's UI, and removing voting is probably the smallest possible improvement. But it's probably easy to just disable it for a while, and see what happens? Justin ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 2015-06-09 5:24 PM, Xidorn Quan wrote: On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 9:09 AM, Mark Côté mc...@mozilla.com wrote: In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map, over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down at least a bit if I can. That sounds good. One big hurdle is that *every* feature in Bugzilla has at least one person who likes it. Some people are going to have to make sacrifices if we are to cut down on complexity for the greater good. :) To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. I'll vote not to remove voting. Although I don't see it is used to prioritize features or fixes, I feel it is still a good channel to know what users want without letting them spam in comments. I would ask, then, what the purpose of the feature is. If we know it isn't used to make decisions, why use it? The only thing I can think of is as a sort of spam honeypot, to get people to not +1 or me too bugs, but this seems strange at best and actively misleading at worst. Mark ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/9/2015 2:09 PM, Mark Côté wrote: If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. Thanks, Mark I've always considered voting as an important feature for Thunderbird bugs. Yes it is not a statistically valid sample of your users, but that does not mean it is useless. A bug with 200 votes has made a statement that a bug with 1 vote has not. I regularly do searches for bugs, limiting myself to bugs that have more than X number of votes. Without voting, how do you direct users to express an interest in seeing a bug solved without adding a me too comment? Kent James ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/9/15 17:00, Justin Dolske wrote: On 6/9/15 2:24 PM, Chris Peterson wrote: I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's real CC list. I think if Bugzilla, with its long and complex history, ever has a hope of being untangled into something better, we can't keep every feature because of all the possible ways it might be used. :) OBxkcd: http://xkcd.com/1172/ /a ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
I've never seen votes make a real difference in the 6 years I've been around on Bugzilla. The one use case I can think for keeping them is as an escape valve for user frustration on old, long-standing bugs like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41489 I.e. when people start griping about I can't believe lame Mzilla hasn't fixed this yet we can tell people to vote instead of filling the comments with complaints. But that's a rare case and I'm not sure it's worth keeping voting just for that. On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Chris Peterson cpeter...@mozilla.com wrote: On 6/9/15 2:09 PM, Mark Côté wrote: In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map, over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down at least a bit if I can. To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's real CC list. chris ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform -- Jason ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 2015-06-09 6:00 PM, Justin Dolske wrote: That said, there are much bigger issues with Bugzilla's UI, and removing voting is probably the smallest possible improvement. But it's probably easy to just disable it for a while, and see what happens? Indeed, it's a minor thing. Consider it a test for future feature removals. ;) There are other on-going efforts to improve UX, such as the modal UI, which, in addition to being a cleaner interface, is also a platform for further experimentation. Mark ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 2015-06-09 5:09 PM, Mark Côté wrote: In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map, over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down at least a bit if I can. To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. I cannot remember a single instance where I or someone who I know has used the number of votes on a bug as an input for making a decision, and that is for good reason, since the number of votes tell you nothing about how severe a problem actually is, and everything about, well, how many people have voted for it. I have however seen people on few occasions recommending angry users to vote for a bug, mostly as a way to make them stop complaining. I find that dishonest and distasteful, if not meant as a joke. On the question of voting instead of CCing to reduce spam, I have decided long time ago that it is the responsibility of other people to opt in to not receive emails for CC changes if they wish so, not mine. I CC myself on bugs mercilessly. ;-) I have heard some people use votes as way to only get bugmail when a bug gets resolved, for example, after having customized their Bugzilla settings. That is a valid use case, but it is at best a gross hack, and if the decision were up to me, I wouldn't keep votes for this use case. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
I have seen voting being recommended as alternative to +1's which is a plus, we have never used them to prioritise although not sure our area of bugs is popular enough to be using votes in that way. As a developer of a bugzilla client however I have see a major missing feature being the ability to favourite bugs in bugzilla., not to cc and get a baggage of email but somewhere you can keep check on a list of bugs you have an interest in, personally I make a meta bug and block it with bugs I am interested in (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=965185) but I could see vote being re purposed as favourite very easily On 10 June 2015 at 00:06, Dave Camp dc...@mozilla.com wrote: We don't use bugzilla votes as a strong signal for prioritization on devtools. We do actually keep an eye on votes in some other channels ( ffdevtools.uservoice.com), but I don't think anyone on devtools would object strongly to votes going away in bugzilla. -dave On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 3:48 PM, Axel Hecht l...@mozilla.com wrote: I recall that at least one group actively uses votes to prioritize stuff. I can't really tell which one, I'm leaning towards devtools, but I don't have any data to back that up. I mostly remember because I was surprised. Also, for a component like devtools, I can see how it'd make sense. Axel On 6/10/15 12:09 AM, Mark Côté wrote: In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map, over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down at least a bit if I can. To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. Thanks, Mark ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/9/2015 4:09 PM, Mark Côté wrote: To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. I weakly object to removing the feature. I've used voting in the past to avoid CC spam and more recently to get different email notification levels. Actually, my biggest problem with using votes in queries is that I don't care about the actual number of votes so much as I care about the vote rate: A bug filed last month with 5 votes is something that requires prompt attention while a bug filed 15 years ago with 20 votes typically means this is a hard-to-implement feature for a rare case or some other similar rationale that makes it not worth including in list priorities. -- Joshua Cranmer Thunderbird and DXR developer Source code archæologist ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
Dale Harvey wrote: As a developer of a bugzilla client however I have see a major missing feature being the ability to favourite bugs in bugzilla., not to cc and get a baggage of email but somewhere you can keep check on a list of bugs you have an interest in, personally I make a meta bug and block it with bugs I am interested in (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=965185) but I could see vote being re purposed as favourite very easily this feature exists and is called bug tagging. you'll need to enable it via the prefs page (it's disabled by default because the ux needs some love). https://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.2/en/html/query.html#individual-buglists (section 5.5.5). -glob -- byron jones - :glob - bugzilla.mozilla.org team lead - ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 5:09 PM, Mark Côté mc...@mozilla.com wrote: To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really being used to prioritize features fixes. If your team uses voting, I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes sense to continue to support this feature. We used voting for a while on the MDN platform project, but the process changed a year or so ago and they're not actively being used anymore, I think. I found it to be a pretty neat feature, frankly. I use it for personal projects on my own Bugzilla for shareware stuff I do for retro machines. -- Eric Shepherd Senior Technical Writer Mozilla Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/sheppy ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/9/2015 6:00 PM, Justin Dolske wrote: On 6/9/15 2:24 PM, Chris Peterson wrote: I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's real CC list. I think if Bugzilla, with its long and complex history, ever has a hope of being untangled into something better, we can't keep every feature because of all the possible ways it might be used. :) Here, I'd suggest that the default should be to _not_ send emails for CC changes, unless a user opts into it (and maybe even not even for that, it's just spammy for anyone managing lots of bugs. But baby steps...). Net improvement, no matter what happens with voting. I'd agree that voting could be removed. Most people know that it was added as a way to counter +1! type comments. I've never heard such a thing. However, if it does that, then it does have a purpose - one that I'd just as soon keep until an alternative is offered that doesn't require monitoring and work. (which tagging, mentioned below, does require) But I'd counter that (1) it's unclear that it's very effective in that role and (2) I've rarely actually seen people telling people to use voting. (1) may be true only for projects that don't use it. (2) should held against the feature because ___? We have better tools now with the ability to tag and hide comments (https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/comment_tagging) which I _do_ see used frequently, as well as the ability to entirely disable commenting on bugs in extenuating circumstances. I'd like to see those further improved. We can all agree we'd rather not see unhelpful comments nor have to deal with them. Personally I'd rather not have to tag unuseful comments. That said, there are much bigger issues with Bugzilla's UI, and removing voting is probably the smallest possible improvement. But it's probably easy to just disable it for a while, and see what happens? I never have seen the voting UI as being the least bit distracting. So I'd completely agree, other things in the UI are FAR more deserving of attention and discussion. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On 6/9/15 7:09 PM, Ehsan Akhgari wrote: I cannot remember a single instance where I or someone who I know has used the number of votes on a bug as an input for making a decision, and that is for good reason, since the number of votes tell you nothing about how severe a problem actually is, and everything about, well, how many people have voted for it. +1. (omgwait, how do I vote for a email?!) I think that this is where someone's supposed to point out that the #1 most-voted-for bug is the MNG bug. And #2 is implement W3C XForms in browser and composer. Justin ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
Byron Jones wrote: this feature exists and is called bug tagging. you'll need to enable it via the prefs page (it's disabled by default because the ux needs some love). https://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.2/en/html/query.html#individual-buglists (section 5.5.5). i should add that the plan for this is to make it much more discoverable. this will likely involve renaming it to favourites (or similar) to better reflect the personal nature of these lists, and a complete overhaul of its user interface. -glob -- byron jones - :glob - bugzilla.mozilla.org team lead - ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Voting in BMO
On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 08:13:15PM -0700, Justin Dolske wrote: On 6/9/15 7:09 PM, Ehsan Akhgari wrote: I cannot remember a single instance where I or someone who I know has used the number of votes on a bug as an input for making a decision, and that is for good reason, since the number of votes tell you nothing about how severe a problem actually is, and everything about, well, how many people have voted for it. +1. (omgwait, how do I vote for a email?!) I think that this is where someone's supposed to point out that the #1 most-voted-for bug is the MNG bug. And #2 is implement W3C XForms in browser and composer. The MNG bug also only has 698 votes. That doesn't even seem like a lot considering it's #1 and considering the history of the bug. Mike ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
