Comment 6 for bug 531963

I don't want to get in the way of taking a good first step, especially if it's been specifically requested by users.

> Martin, 'bug contributor' is defined as anyone who has ever been assigned a bug in the project. So it does not take into account any triaging work. Do you have active bug triaggers who don't ever assign themselves bugs, too? i.e. do you think this will become a problem in practice?

Yes, we do, and I'm also often in that role myself on Ubuntu or other projects. It seems like just a very normal thing on Launchpad that you will eg change a bug from incomplete to confirmed when you provide the requested information, without ever being assigned bugs on that project.

Also some projects may just not use assignment.

I think we need a model of what is going wrong here:

0- people are trying to make a valid change, and simply clicking the wrong menu item
1- users are intentionally misbehaving, like insisting on reopening a bug that the developers have said they wontfix -- this may not help much
2- users are well-intentioned but clueless: they do mean to change the status but they don't know how they should change it -- this may make them think twice but some will steam ahead; those who are not overconfident probably aren't clicking it already
3- people are just accidentally clicking that control while trying to do something else, then randomly clicking around to escape
... more

Case 1 and 2 do happen, but won't have been particularly exacerbated by the ajax status chooser, except in that by making it faster we might have made impulsive actions easier.

I do think 0 is a problem, because I misclick on the status chooser fairly often myself. This can affect real developers as much as it does novice users, except that experienced users might learn to be more careful. Adding a confirmation step seems like a bit of a kludge if this is the main problem - you might as well just turn off the popup and let people use the fold-out form.

If this is in fact the problem there are several things you could do to address it. For example in that menu, the current item is always disabled (???) which is inconsistent with normal popup menus, and means that if someone unintentionally opened that menu, it's a bit harder for them to escape from it without making a change. The fact that the label doesn't update for several seconds after you make a choice may cause confusion. Also it looks like (?) every change causes mail to be sent, with no batching, which may make misclicks appear more noisy.