Display pointer to bug etiquette?

[Colin Watson]

I recently ran across https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html, which documents a number of good practices for bug commenters which I wish people would follow more often in Launchpad. I wonder if it would help to include a link to something like this when people are commenting on bugs? (Obviously no document can stop people from being obnoxious, but it would also serve as something for people to point to.) I was particularly struck by "No pointless comments" and "No personal abuse". For instance, it's common enough for people to add pointless comments to Ubuntu bugs saying that Ubuntu is clearly becoming like Microsoft because <random unconnected thing>. This kind of comment is very demotivating when it comes to fixing the bug in question, and yet it usually falls below what I'd expect to be the threshold for abuse of the Launchpad service in general.

I put together a lightly-rebranded draft at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugEtiquette, and am interested in whether other people think this is reasonable.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

<http://credibility.stanford.edu/captology/notebook/archives.new/2006/01/a_small_phrase.html>

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

We could discourage uninformative comments (see also bug 93285) by:
* Renaming "Add a comment" to "Add more information".
* Discarding whitespace-only comments (bug 198058).
* Not providing easy linking to, or quoting of, previous comments in the Web interface (because that would encourage going off-topic).

We could discourage over-long comments by:
* Reducing the height of the comment field.
* Tinting the comment field background first yellow, then orange, then red as someone enters more text.
* Not providing easy quoting of previous comments in the Web interface (because that would encourage long quoted sections).

We could discourage obnoxious comments by:
* Adding a note under the comment field, e.g. "Be brief and civil".
* Letting people rate comments.
* Letting project admins delete obnoxious comments, and having high-profile projects do this promptly (the broken-windows model).

We could improve the eventual quality of comments by:
* Letting commenters or admins delete a comment (bug 201121).

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

FWIW I don't find over-long comments to be a problem (any more, anyway; they used to be a problem when people failed to find the attachment feature, but that's been fixed). If comments are long and ranty, then the rantiness is the problem, but more often than not I find that long comments come from the more thoughtful contributors who have taken the time to think about what they're writing. We should encourage rather than discourage such behaviour.