Voting in bugzilla

[Matt McCutchen]

On Thu, 2010-09-02 at 09:17 -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Sep 2010 12:18:26 +0300 (EEST)
> Juha Tuomala <Juha.Tuomala at iki.fi> wrote:
> > Has it been disabled recently?
> 
> Short answer: Yes. It has. 
> 
> Longer answer: 
> 
> FESCo looked at trying to use voting data to give us an idea on 'hot'
> bugs that we might be able to send more resources to fix. Sadly, voting
> isn't at all good for this, as people have many votes (100 or 1000, I
> forget which),

It was 100.

> so it's hard to tell if an issue affects 10 people or
> 100 by that.

If you simply want to know the number of people affected, Bugzilla can
be configured to allow one vote per bug up to some large number of bugs.
The Mozilla Core product is set up this way.  See, for example, my
votes:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/votes.cgi?action=show_user&user_id=316870

But it's worth discussing whether that is the best model for Fedora.
Letting each user distribute 100 votes over a set of bugs is also
reasonable.  If a bug affects 100 people but they did not see fit to
give it many total votes, maybe it is not that important.

> Many people didn't see the voting interface, so they
> wouldn't have used it even if the problem was severe or affected a lot
> of people. Some people were using the voting interface, even though no
> maintainers ever noticed it (ie, thinking this could help the bug get
> solved, but it's like the maintainer and voter were in seperate worlds
> without any communication). 
> 
> So, we decided it would be less confusing to just disable it. 
> 
> We decided to look into using CC or comments to tell when a bug had a
> lot of people affected or was 'very active'. Unfortunately, this also
> is proving to be difficult to implement. See: 
> https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-engineering-services/ticket/24
> any help there would be appreciated.

Please take care not to create an incentive for people to add "me too"
comments, since that will annoy everyone.  And a CC doesn't always
indicate a desire to have the bug fixed.  Google Code currently
conflates CC with voting, and there is a bug to separate the two
concepts (https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=1108).

The best solution may be to reenable the Bugzilla voting feature but
configure and publicize it properly.

-- 
Matt