Notifications don't tell you whether you're a bug's reporter

[Brian Murray]

As far as I can tell there is not a distinction between when you are a Reporter or a Subscriber of a bug report in the e-mails that Malone sends. Below is a bug I reported with the Rationale set to Subscriber:

Subject: [Bug 128130] Re: yelp crashed with SIGSEGV
X-Launchpad-Bug: product=yelp; status=Unknown; importance=Unknown;
        assignee=None;
X-Launchpad-Bug: distribution=ubuntu; sourcepackage=yelp; component=main;
        status=Triaged; importance=Medium;
        <email address hidden>;
X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Subscriber

Personally I am subscribed to quite a lot of bugs and it would be helpful to sort the ones I have reported.

(The equivalent for merge proposals is bug 353325.)

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Well, the reason we can't do that is that you don't get emailed for being a reporter :-) The reporter is subscribed upon bug creation, but he can unsubscribe later. That's why it can't fit in the -Message-Rationale header. Do you have an alternative suggestion?

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I suggest making the reporter an implicit subscriber. This would be helpful not just for clarifying the X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale header, but also for the new page layout: I'm hoping to present the reporter and other subscribers in (separate parts of) an overall list of notified people, and I'd rather the reporter wasn't listed twice.

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

That would cause him to never be able to unsubscribe unless we implement ignore subscriptions, which are not on the roadmap; that's not an option. So either we add this as a separate header, or find a different way of doing it.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I just encountered a use case for this. I received a notification about a bug report being marked Incomplete, but I couldn't remember whether I was the reporter or not, and the notification didn't tell me. So I had to visit the Web page to find out whether it was me who was supposed to provide the missing information. I shouldn't have had to do that.

In any case, *this* bug report isn't incomplete: the problem is fully described, that you can't tell whether you're getting a notification from being the reporter. The proposed solution is probably suboptimal (it wouldn't have helped me, for example, since I don't filter by header), but that just shows we shouldn't expect end users to design solutions to the problems they report. :-)

[Björn Tillenius (bjornt)]

There should be a new header indicating the bug reporter.

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Well, we could also include the original reporter of the individual task. What do you think of that, Bjorn?

We could also add this information to the footer:

--
how bzr push command for empty branches
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/258610 reported by Martin Pool on 2008-04-12
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Launchpad
Security, which is a direct subscriber.

That would address Matthew's use case, though it's a bit of a bogus use case (in practice, how many users really file so many bugs they actually forget they reported it?)

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I think it would be more cluttersome than useful to include the name of the reporter in every bug notification. I'd rather the footer be shorter, not longer, and
    You received this message because you reported the bug.
is both shorter and more relevant to me than
    You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
    of the bug.
(I guess this an example of how making an interface concise is harder than making it long-winded.)

Reporting many bugs is one way to forget that you're the reporter of a particular bug, but not the only way. Another way is to report a bug and have it responded to months or years later. Launchpad could do various things to make that less likely, but I don't think there's any reasonable way Launchpad could make it never happen.

[Karl Fogel (kfogel)]

Bjorn: by "There should be a new header indicating the bug reporter", do you mean that has been implemented, or just that it would be desirable for it to be implemented?

AFAICT it is not implemented currently. I think adding an "X-Launchpad-Bug-Reporter:" header is a terrific idea.

[Ursula Junque (ursinha)]

Fixed in stable r11047 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/11047>.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Reported bug 643320 on showing this in the visible part of the message.