The reader's eye will naturally search for the first block of
looks-like-human-written text when reader ready. People know how to
skip over things like status lines, tag lists, etc -- all that stuff
goes in the category of "automatically generated information that I
can consult later, after I understand what this bug is about".
So we don't have to worry about the reader finding the description;
they know how to do that.
But the reader will not expect meaningful-but-autogenerated
information between the description and the first comment. After all,
the comments are almost always responses to the description, as with
an email or forum thread. And thread-reading interfaces don't
normally have gunk between the messages; instead, they put all the
gunk at the top or the bottom of the thread as a whole, or in the
differently-colored separator rectangles between messages. We're
violating that principle with the stuff we put between the description
and the first comment, and thus we make it hard to see.
FWIW, +1 on what Jamu and Martin said.
Further justification, if needed:
The reader's eye will naturally search for the first block of human-written text when reader ready. People know how to
looks-like-
skip over things like status lines, tag lists, etc -- all that stuff
goes in the category of "automatically generated information that I
can consult later, after I understand what this bug is about".
So we don't have to worry about the reader finding the description;
they know how to do that.
But the reader will not expect meaningful- but-autogenerat ed
information between the description and the first comment. After all,
the comments are almost always responses to the description, as with
an email or forum thread. And thread-reading interfaces don't
normally have gunk between the messages; instead, they put all the
gunk at the top or the bottom of the thread as a whole, or in the
differently-colored separator rectangles between messages. We're
violating that principle with the stuff we put between the description
and the first comment, and thus we make it hard to see.