introduce two tier comment system to produce higher quality bug reports

[Bartek]

Bugs that affect many users for a long time often produce a lively discussion in the bug report's comment section, strongly affecting legibility of the report and deviating attention away from the actual problem through the posting of workarounds (or flames, for that matter).

I propose for Launchpad to introduce a two tier comment system so that moderators and more engaged users can move "inappropriate" comments into a "discussion-level" comment section for a given bug report without having to delete them or create a new "high-quality" report. Important comments that develop in the discussion section can likewise be transferred into the main section.

On the web front, this would probably be best implemented as a tab system, with the tab switching between the two columns of comments. Possibly a third could be introduced to display all comments and showing arrows to move comments between the two.

The two column system would also allow said moderator or engaged user to easily post a summary of what has been said into the main comment section.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

It sort of reminds me of Wikipedia's "Talk" pages, where people can discuss the encyclopedia page, but that the talk page isn't really considered "part" of the encyclopedia and can be messy, weirdly formatted, etc.

It might be interesting to have something similar, with "official" and "unofficial" comment discussions for a bug, but I would worry that what would happen is that it would be hard to follow the discussion, and people would be confused as to where to put new comments to. Moderators could be used to move comments to the correct location, but given how many bugs there are in a typical open source project, I think this would be an overwhelming amount of labor.

Instead, I think steps could be taken to encourage better use of the "Affects me too" function, which would cut down noise considerably. There are already several bug reports and blueprints submitted around this approach.

[Bartek (tschew)]

Hi Bryce,

while I understand your concerns about labour costs, most of the bugs on launchpad are not of the type which attracts hundreds of comments and thus only few will have to make use of this functionality. Those that do generate so much furour are generally those that need fixing most urgently and would thus benefit from increased legibility.

Further, in order to fix a given bug most comments need to be read through for pointers anyway and clicking "add to important list" for a given comment is a minimal additional effort for a given maintainer. Finally, the "important" section will not be accessible for posting by anyone other than the assignee (with moderators only able to add existing comments there) so no confusion about where to post will arise for users.

One really important use of the feature would be the pointing out of workarounds or patches, which are currently often buried at "comment #342".

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

This is an interesting idea, but I don't think we would do this. Like Bryce, I favor improving "affects me" and other such features to improve the quality of bug reports.