Boilerplate responses to duplicates could be automated and dynamic

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

When a bug reported about Ubuntu is a duplicate, QA staff are instructed to include a boilerplate message <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Responses#head-c9465ec0d0c312bab06eac061dbdc6d2071204d1>: "Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug NUMBER, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find."

Apart from the project name, nothing about this message is specific to Ubuntu. It would work just as well for any project, so requiring QA staff to enter it manually is inefficient.

Using boilerplate messages also makes searching more difficult, if you are searching for a word (such as "marked" or "workaround") that happens to have been used in the boilerplate.

Therefore it would be better if Launchpad itself presented the boilerplate, not as part of a bug comment, but as separate text that was not included in the bug report's full-text index. It could be specially formatted (for example, with a background tint and a proportional font), so that QA staff would recognize it instantly and be able to skip over it. And the text could be refined over time, with changes applying instantly to all new e-mail notifications, and retrospectively to all Web pages.

Landing this change would require educating QA staff to stop using their existing boilerplates, bookmarklets, Greasemonkey scripts, etc. Therefore it might make sense to introduce it at the same time as implementing inline duplicate marking.