Adding report spam link to comments in forums

There are no automated tests for the drupalorg module, see #1974400: Add some simpletests and enable patch testing for the drupalorg queue for more on that. But setting to 'needs review' is still a good idea to get the maintainers to look at it. ;)

At this point, we're mostly focused on the D7 upgrade of Drupal.org, but small useful changes like this might still be deployable.

Some issues with the patch:

A) The default body of the issue says "Reporting the following comment as spam: " but the link is just to the node itself. It'd be much better if the auto-generated link brought you straight to the spam comment in question.

B) Typo in the PHPDoc: "Implements_hook_permission()" -- you don't want the first underscore there. ;)

C) It'd be nice to have a PHPDoc comment for drupalorg_comment_view_alter().

D) If you're interested in seeing this deployed "soon", it'd be great to provide both D7 and D6 versions of the patch.

Thanks!
-Derek

Please only post useful issue followups.

@Jaypan: Seriously, please stop. This isn't helping, and if anything is just making those of us who might want to work on this resentful and unlikely to go out of our way to scratch your itch.

Bigger picture: we're desperately trying to get Drupal.org upgraded to D7. It's over a year late (for reasons I don't have time or desire to enumerate). The Drupal.org Team (such as it is) is *incredibly* busy. Small feature requests like this are *not* the top priority. If everyone who wanted to do anything around here was bumping issues like this every (few) day(s), the volunteers (and occasionally paid staff) would run away screaming from this horrible situation.

Also, because this is such a large, high-profile site with a huge and active user-base, even relatively "small" changes require lots of care and work to ensure they're not breaking anything. It's not just that we have to re-review your patch, commit it, and hope for the best. We have a duty to the entire Drupal community to be extremely diligent with any changes we roll out.

Please understand that your patches here are not the only thing (literally) screaming for our attention.

Thanks,
-Derek

People are busy. This is a volunteer operation. The paid staff at the DA are focusing on a 1:1 upgrade of the D6 site. This issue will be looked at when there's time available to spend on it. This is not a forum post, therefore the forum "bump" guideline does not apply. You were not berated. dww explained quite clearly what was causing the delay. Your time is no different than many of the other people that volunteer every day to help keep Drupal.org running, not to mention the countless hours that are spent on core and contrib work. Sorry you're frustrated, but you need to chill.

Reopening, since this is still a valid feature request.

Sigh.

For clarity:

- I didn't berate you.

- In #3 said:

At this point, we're mostly focused on the D7 upgrade of Drupal.org, but small useful changes like this might still be deployable.

Sorry I didn't put "might" in italics or bold.

- Also in #3 I said:

D) If you're interested in seeing this deployed "soon", it'd be great to provide both D7 and D6 versions of the patch.

I intentionally put "soon" in quotes since I wasn't making any promises. Sorry if the subtlety of what I was trying to say was lost there. I was both reviewing your patch and giving you feedback, and trying to set your expectations.

Meanwhile, almost all of June and much of July were spent dealing with the fallout from https://drupal.org/news/130529SecurityUpdate -- which ate into our (limited) time, set the D7 upgrade back even further, and also made us even more hesitant about deploying changes on Drupal.org.

I appreciate that you worked on a solution. I can relate to being frustrated by putting work into something and then not having it see the light of day. It happens a lot, especially in Open Source. I'm just asking you to have some empathy for the other people in the situation and attempt to see things from their perspective, too.

Thanks,
-Derek

p.s. Wow, just saw the last few updates -- you posted a patch for some GPL code to a public issue tracker, and now you're trying to prevent people from using "your" code since they don't have your "blessing"? That's amazing. Maybe I should berate you. ;) But I won't. Meanwhile, please reconsider if lashing out in frustration is your best course of action here. Cheers.

Yeah. We handled it poorly.

lol.

We explained to you multiple time what the delays were from. You, however, decided to ignore those explanations and bump this thread continually and blame everyone else because they didn't have time to come look at your patch (despite prior explanation about how everyone is busy). You've also been consistently hostile toward everyone telling you that things are busy and it's probably going to take a while.

Tell me again how we handled this poorly?

Jaypan – I certainly appreciate your patches here.

For code review, I think we do not need a separate permission for this. I think the permission check can be something like node_access('create', 'project_issue').

Re https://drupal.org/forum-posting#bump – the conventions in the issue queue are different. Bumping of any kind is discouraged as far as I'm aware. https://drupal.org/node/73178 does not mention it positively or negatively. Many active projects on Drupal.org have good patches that wait days or weeks.

Clearly you think I'm a villain in this thread, and it seems like my attempts to communicate aren't being heard. So this might be a waste of time. But I want to try once more since I hope you'll reconsider your decision to stop contributing and your understanding of what happened here.

- For most of June I was involved in a major project, unrelated to Drupal.org. What little time for Drupal.org I had was mostly for fallout from the security breach.

- I was totally offline for all of July (in my "other life" I'm a professional musician).

- I came back to many pages of my tracker with literally 100s of issues that had been updated while I was gone. I had to spend a lot of time reading through it all, prioritizing what to work on, etc.

- I saw this thread, saw drumm's comment asking you to "Please only post useful issue followups" (which was not berating you) and your reply appeared to be threatening to bump this thread every day until we committed your patches. I was initially outraged, but instead of doing something unproductive (like berating you), I decided to just focus on other things and come back to this with a clear head.

- When I finally replied, I also did not berate you. I said, "Seriously, please stop" and tried to give you some insight into the other side of the situation. Frustrated by not having your patches committed yet, you interpreted my attempt to communicate as angry and extended scolding (what "berate" means). Further attempts to communicate were met by more hostility.

- I'm not billing the Drupal Association (or anyone else) for the effort I've spent on this thread. I'm just another volunteer, with limited time and far too many responsibilities and things people expect me to be able to solve.

- Yes, contributing to Drupal.org can be hard and at times frustrating. If my full-time job was to facilitate volunteers to contribute to Drupal.org, things would be different. If 5 people had that full time job, it'd be different still. But sadly, that's not the reality. This is almost entirely a volunteer operation, we all have other lives, and we all normally get paid well for our labor. So, often things don't move as fast as everyone would want them to. But, generally, it's worth it, even if we're not getting paid. However, threads like this are discouraging. I try very hard to be empathetic and compassionate when I communicate, and I'm still painted as an unreasonable jerk. I try hard to be supportive and grateful, and you accuse me of alienating you and discouraging your contributions. Even when you're lashing out at me, I'm trying to encourage you to keep contributing instead of storming off, and you're still angry and saying "[y]ou people have handled this poorly." Am I saint? Definitely not. Do I get frustrated interacting with people in the Drupal.org-related issue queues? Sometimes. Do I always handle every communication in the best possible way? No. But am I trying? Yes.

If I had no empathy for the frustration you feel about not having your patches committed, I would have written you off as a troll. But I know you're upset and I understand why, so I'm trying help you to understand the other people you're interacting with. I'd like you to see an alternate explanation than (to paraphrase): "you people don't care about other contributors, and after I spent my valuable time to fix an old but important problem, you simply ignored me until you started berating me for trying to help."

- Please don't lump everything anyone says into "you people" -- we're not coordinating our replies, and I don't agree with everything cweagans has written here, either.

- Meanwhile, check this out:

https://drupal.org/project/issues/search?assigned=dww&status%5B%5D=8&sta...

Those are some of the issues where I've submitted patches that still haven't been committed, in many cases, not even reviewed. (Doesn't include the ones that "need work" for minor nitpicks, nor where I submitted a patch but the issue is assigned to someone else). Some are over 5 years old. ;) Cool huh? Not really. Honestly, it kind of sucks. But I understand why it happens, so I'm not getting bent out of shape about it and shortening my lifespan by being angry and stressed out, and I'm definitely not lashing out at those maintainers and insulting them because of it. And yes, I keep contributing patches, even when I know there's a chance they'll never get committed.

- Meta: I've probably spent more time trying to be empathetic and communicate with you than it might have taken to review your patches. That's too bad. But please consider the role that your angry replies have played in that reality. Given that this escalated into a threat to stop contributing entirely and accusations about how poorly we handle contributions, I've felt the need to reply to your concerns instead of "being the voice of reason" and just looking at your code. We're humans, not robots, and we all have feelings. Mine are hurt when people are this upset at what they perceive as my wrong-doing, especially when I don't believe I've really done anything wrong.

Hoping you might be able to have some understanding for your fellow contributors, and that you'll keep contributing.

Thanks,
-Derek

p.s. One major difference between forum posts and issues is that many people, especially maintainers, subscribe to their issue queues via email. So "bumping" doesn't just bump it to the top of a listing on the website (either the project's queue or a person's tracker pages), it's also generating a lot of noise in potentially 100s of people's inboxes.

Sorry my reply in #14 was too terse. As mentioned in #31, this patch is appreciated and I think almost ready to be committed to 7.x. The D7 launch is currently looking like it will happen in about 2 months, so 6.x is a possibility in the meantime.

I posted a note about this to #966964: Create standards for tone and tenor in the issue queues so we can do a better job in Drupal.org-related, and other, issue queues.

Hi @jaypan - I'm on the board of the DA, and I chair the community working group (cwg). I'd love to find a shared time to chat with you. Find me on IRC as kattekrab too, generally in #drupal-association. I'm a volunteer too :-)

@drumm - thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Let's return this issue to one about fighting spam...

and tackle the issue queue process and failues in the new issue that @drumm has created in the cwg queue #966964: Create standards for tone and tenor in the issue queues

@dww and @cweagans - thanks also to you for your time and effort, and for explaining the D.O situation.

and FWIW it's totally a +1 from me for a spam fighting feature!

Thanks!

Here's a pair of untested re-rolls. Instead of manually constructing the query string, I find the code is more readable like this (and the url() function will handle the urlencode() for us). I also fixed a few minor issues with the code comments to better comply with our coding standards.

I'm about to leave again for a few weeks, so I can't commit and deploy this with a clear conscience (we have an unofficial policy *not* to deploy any changes if you can't be around to make sure they didn't break anything and resolve problems that might arise), but hopefully drumm can get to it reasonably soon. If not, I'll try to make time to test and deploy sometime in the first two weeks of September. Again, the D7 launch is our top priority, so this might lag, but it's not because we don't care -- we just have to ruthlessly prioritize sometimes.

Thanks again, and sorry this issue got so derailed into meta...

Cheers,
-Derek

Indeed, this is only for comments. Good point.

Yup, we're all learning. :) I need to remember that not everyone has all the same context I do, and it helps to communicate that context to avoid misunderstandings.

Cheers,
-Derek

Sweet, thanks! Yeah, as I said, my patches were totally untested. ;) Thanks for fixing the bug with the inconsistency.

Looks like this needs review again, so setting status accordingly. Very quick skim looks great, but I don't have time to properly test now. I desperately need to pack. ;)

Thanks for coming back to this and doing a great job with it!

Cheers,
-Derek

Committed to 7.x: http://drupalcode.org/project/drupalorg.git/commit/2773eee

I went ahead and committed a followup: http://drupalcode.org/project/drupalorg.git/commit/fb8d72d

• Not all node types on Drupal.org have links, or are necessarily prone to spam. For now, I limited it to only forum nodes. We can always expand it later.
• The "Report spam" link was showing before "Add new comment." I made a module-specific link group for drupalorg instead of piling into node; I think that may be more technically correct too, not that it matters a lot in our site-specific module.

drumm, I don't think your follow up commit fully worked, right now on git7site 'report spam' link is on comments everywhere: issue pages, doc pages, case studies.

Jaypan, during D7 upgrade QA we got a report about accessibility problems with the link, here is related issue if you want to take a look #2095983: Accessibility problem with 'report spam' link - it needs more context.
As for 6.x, afaik it hasn't been committed there yet, D7 launch is so close at this point that it might make sense to just wait for it.

We provide development sites, which are a copy of Drupal.org with sanitized database. Here is more info: https://drupal.org/node/1018084

One more related issue #2096419: Pre-populate "Category" field via 'report spam' link

drumm, I don't think your follow up commit fully worked, right now on git7site 'report spam' link is on comments everywhere: issue pages, doc pages, case studies.

Looks like they are showing on comments everywhere, but not the nodes themselves. I think this is okay since comments are always prone to spam.

Oh, I thought you removed from comments, not nodes itself. Agree, it's ok.