Managing issue queues is hard enough as it is without random users coming along and...

- Closing feature/bug reports because they've managed to figure out a way to change it on their own site.
- Reopening solved feature/bug issues for somewhat related support.
- Otherwise hijacking issues, changing the title, or the issue information for their own purposes.

Has this been discussed anywhere else? It is a source of distress for me, and often when I go to work on drupal stuff, and find out this has been going on, it puts me right off and I don't do anything :/

Comments

avpaderno’s picture

avpaderno
he/him
Primary language Italian
Location Brescia, 🇮🇹 🇪🇺
commented
Project: Drupal.org infrastructure » Drupal.org site moderators

An issue should not be closed from a user just because he found a work-around for his site; there could be users who cannot apply the same work-around, which is still a work-around (not the solution).

In none of the cases you reported, the issue should be changed. The only thing that can be done is to change the report to its original status, or title, which is what a site maintainer, or administrator user would do, though.

If you are asking if there is something that should be done for the user who wrongly changed an issue report, I can only say that you can explain to the user what he is doing wrong; consider that users come from different places, and it could not be obvious what they are supposed to do.
If you are asking if there is something site maintainers can do in these cases, I can say (it's my personal opinion, though, and not a Drupal.org policy) that it becomes relevant for site maintainers if a user keeps, in example, to change the report title to something completely not related. In such cases, the user is warned that he is doing something that he should not do.

danielb’s picture

danielb commented

An issue should not be closed from a user just because he found a work-around for his site; there could be users who cannot apply the same work-around, which is still a work-around (not the solution).

In none of the cases you reported, the issue should be changed. The only thing that can be done is to change the report to its original status, or title, which is what a site maintainer, or administrator user would do, though.

Right that is why I'm posting. If issues are closed there is a chance I will not see that this has happened, and people taking issues in new directions takes up more time to sort out.

If you are asking if there is something that should be done for the user...

If you are asking if there is something site maintainers can do in these cases...

No, not quite.

I am looking for whether this is a problem for other module maintainers, with a view to requesting a feature for the project issue tracker where these settings can be locked off, at least to inexperienced users. There could also be a feature to split off a post into a new issue rather than having to further diverge the issue by explaining to start a new issue, etc...

Surely I'm not the first person to have said something about this?

dddave’s picture

dddave commented

I do help out quite a lot in the issue queues and noticed that the number of novice users "creating havoc" has increased over the last months. I think it would be good to clearly post some guidelines like merlinofchaos does in his queues. In addition links to http://drupal.org/node/317 and/or http://drupal.org/forum-posting might be useful.

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

@danielb and @dddave

I maintain many modules (37+ last I counted, maybe more now), and all in all, this is not such a big issue.

Humans will be unpredictable and will not use things as they are intended. Look at home tagging of photos is used in Facebook. It is intended to be "Hey, you were present in this photo", but I see it used as "Hey, you should really look at this photo". There are numerous examples from all over the internet and other technologies as well.

What I am saying is that this is inevitable, and as the Drupal community grows, it will happen more and more. We (developers) have to adapt to it.

Ask users not to reopen issues when they do so.
Ask users not to close something that was not fixed (after verifying that this is indeed a bug and not just user confusion or misconfiguration).

dww’s picture

dww
we/he/they
commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

Yeah, the only way to prevent people from doing weird things in the issue queue is to prevent people from doing anything in the issue queue. Once you remove the evil +1 subscribe comments, I'd bet that the % of issue comments that basically do no harm, follow the expectations, and in some way contribute to the issue is extremely high, probably over 99%. If 1% of the time people do weird, unexpected, or perhaps stupid things, that's definitely not something that can be addressed with technology. It just needs a cultural fix to help educate and generalize expectations.

That said, I used to get quite worked up when interacting with people in the issue queues. People would be mean and I'd get defensive or hostile. People would say things out of ignorance (often from not reading something I had written earlier in the same issue) and I'd get really angry at them, and write a self-righteous comment to prove to them how much [sic] smarter I was than them. I've found it's a lot more productive and fun if I lighten up. Probably sounds like a cliche, but seriously, when someone does something weird/stupid in one of your queues, I strongly recommend taking a deep breath before doing anything. ;) The more you can remain relaxed, the more efficient and positive your communication will be.

Good luck!
-Derek