Two comment boxes are confusing

[Matt Zimmerman]

I often find myself in the following two situations:

I'm writing a comment on a bug report, using the text area at the bottom of the page. In the course of writing the comment (which I do in parallel with diagnosing the bug), I realize that the status attributes need to be updated as well. This requires that I open the task and move my comment into the other text area before I can continue, lest some of my input be lost depending on which form I submit.

I change a status attribute, and start writing a comment in the upper text area, then realize that my status change is unnecessary, and revert it. This requires that I move my comment to the lower text area, lest I be foiled by the "You didn't change anything" test when submitting the form.

I can think of a few ways to address this, but disabling the "you didn't change anything" test, so that I could always use the top comment area, seems simplest (see also bug 35322)

- Make them part of the same form

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

Looks like Fabio also ran into this problem, seeing his comment lost: bug 57715

[Steve Magoun (smagoun)]

I find myself in situation #1 a lot - I have lost a number of comments because I add a comment in the bottom comment-entry form, then realize I need to update the bug status.

Any hope of a fix for this? It's really frustrating, even if it is technically an error on my part.

Some suggestions:
- Combine the 2 forms
- Copy the contents of the addcomment form to the editstatus form if the user starts to edit the bug status after entering a comment
- Append the contents of the addcomment form to the editstatus form when the user submits the editstatus form
- Synchronize the content of the 2 forms

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Although having two fields is inelegant, the specific thing that lp complains "you didn't change anything" has now apparently been fixed as bug 35322. Also, you can now change the status through the javascript controls without losing your comment input. So this is now just that having two fields at opposite ends of the page that do the same thing is a mess.