Allow 'official' answer contacts to 'Change status' of a question

[Cesare Tirabassi]

In the Launchpad answer tool, I use the "need attention" facility to easily locate those answer requests that, as the name says, needs attention (questions which I answered or for which I requested information and that are in the OPEN state).

This requires cooperation from the users.
Unfortunately not all users realise that by keeping their tickets open they are clobbering and distracting attention from issues where other users can still be helped.
This include:

- users which do not know how to use the solved button or forget to do so
- users which do not like the answer
- users which do not want to mark their issue as solved

Since the use of "rejection" is controversial, is it possible to add a facility which enable "supporters" to easily remove unwanted requests in their "need attention" list?

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

I too feel that this would be a worthwhile addition.

Possibly a moderation system could be implemented whereby subscribers to the answers system could be permitted to close other peoples request.

Perhaps the "moderator" could click "request close", the ticket shows as closed, but of course the user can re-open it if required.

There is the potential for open/close wars as a user opens a request thinking it is not solved, and the "moderator" closes it again thinking it is. Tricky to manage.

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

Cesare,
you should be able to remove any questions on your Need attention report by posting a comment on the question.
For example, just post an answer on any of these Open questions and it will be removed from your Need attention report (since they will move to the Answered state.)

Alan, in the current model, "posting an answer" on a question is like "closing" it.

If you see any questions for which you were the last one to provide information on your Need attention report, then this is indeed a bug.

[Cesare Tirabassi (norsetto)]

Francis,

yes, this is what I've been doing so far. Unfortunately users can reply and reopen the question.
See for instance the following as an example:

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.20/+question/5332

I would rather prefer to avoid a childish ping-poing and rejecting is unfortunately controversial. I'd rather have a way to "cancel" these from the list of things to do.

And yes, this is not a bug per se, it should be classified as wishlist (I cannot do it myself).

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

Ok, I kind of see the problem.

In that particular case, it would have been better to file a bug about the user's issue and link it to the question. That way, the question would have been 'Answered' (and off your todo list), but the user would still be able to track the long-term resolution of the issue.

But anyway, I'm confirming this bug as we already have a 'Change status' action allowing privileged users to set the status of a question to an arbitrary value. This operation is currently restricted to Launchpad admins and project drivers/registrants. Once we implement 'privileged' answer contacts (answer contacts that are endorsed by the software project as providing "official answers"), we can allow these answer contacts to use the 'Change status' operation.

[Cesare Tirabassi (norsetto)]

Thanks Francis,

I really appreciate your help on this.

You are right about that particular case, and actually I thought about asking the user about opening the bug report, but rejected it thinking "What is the point in opening a bug report we cannot do anything about (beside to track the issue) and most probably nobody would ever even care, lets try not to overload the tracking system, there are so many already"

Silly me, I should think less.....

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

I'd also point out that if a user reopens his question, it will be expired after two weeks if nobody post to it. That would also clean the Open questions lists. But since in that particular case, the questions would be an Expired answered question, it would still be useful to allow 'official' answer contacts to fix the status.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

This feature depends upon the badges spec targeted for 1.1.8

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I removed the milestone because the feature it depends upon will be complete at the end of 1.1.8. Also, we are working to achieve better integration with Bugs for the next few months, so this is not a top priority. I will re-evaluate this each release to see if it can be added to the milestone.