Search defaults promote submission of many duplicates

[Bruce Miller]

When a user searches for a bug, Malone uses a set of defaults which are not immediately obvious to the user. One does not see these defaults until you open the advanced search page.

The defaults are to "withhold" display, that is, not to display both (1) bugs where a fix has been released and (2) duplicate bugs.

This would explain, for example, why bug 61404 does not display under a search for flashplugin-nonfree. Although the fix was released into the archives early on 20060920, it was not picked up by package lists for at least 48 hours. The result was a flood (~20) of duplicate bug reports.

I believe that most of these duplicate bug reports were submitted in good faith because Malone defaults would not display to the would-be submitters that the bug had already been both reported and fixed.

[manuel (manuel-soto)]

I agree with you. I look for flashplugin-nonfree's bugs before file my duplicated bug. Another issue is that all my bugs are reported to baltix and the added Ubuntu distribution, another buggy default value.

[Bruce Miller (brm0423)]

I do not agree that the later bug duplicates the earlier one.

There would be partial overlap (and only partial) if and only if
the developer acted on the remark of Daniel Holbach at
2006-03-15 05:18:35 EST (that is, over six months ago) in the
discussion of bug #3620.

By the way, I put in over half hour's effort looking for bugs
about Malone's design prompting duplicates before I filed my
own. The experience bolsters the point that I am trying to make.

From my point of view, the partial overlap acknowledged above is
insufficient to warrant marking the new report a duplicate.
Fixing the problems identified in bug #69157 would not close bug #3620.

[Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)]

Hello Bruce,

I believe you're reporting two bugs in one report.

One of them is bug 28697. Not displaying the current search filter (which by default is to display one open bugs i.e. Unconfirmed, Needs Info, Confirmed, In Progress and Fix committed) is confusing because leads to people reporting duplicates. Displaying that filter somewhere in the page or the URL would help people figure out that their current search might have left out some bugs.

The second bug is bug 3620. We have lots of unecessary duplicates and to minimize that situation we'll introduce the guided bug form. I'm sure Brad, the developer implementing the guided bug form, will take into consideration all the comments in #3620, as well all the dupes of that bug. If you take a look at that bug's list of dupes, you'll see lots of similarities to what you have reported.

From the development side, it's better to have all issues reported as individual bugs.

So, what do you think?

Sorry for duplicate without a good explanation; Thank you for your feedback. We really appreciate it.

[Bruce Miller (brm0423)]

Thanks in turn for your detailed comments. Whenever a end-user such as I submits a bug report, the goal is to bring unexpected behaviour (and presumably therefore faulty behaviour) to the developers' attention. It is reassuring to see that so many of the issues with Malone are receiving attention. Regards. BRM

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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