members of open teams can assign bugs to the team

[Vish]

Ex: Bug 684800

Member Kai Hendrik Behrends was able to assign the bug to Papercuts Ninja team because he was part of the Papercuts Ninja team. However, this papercuts ninja team is an *open* team and anyone can join the team irrespective of their understanding of the processes - membership of the team does not imply the knowledge or understanding to make statements on behalf of the team.

This problem is possible for any project and any open team. If new members have not fully understood the process, they in turn end up spamming other team members with such assigns.

This isnt a major problem for Moderated or Restricted teams, as they usually accept a member who would have some understanding of the processes of the team they are a part of.

See also bug 837425, about spam from bugs assigned to mailing list teams.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

Seems to me the better fix here is to make the team restricted. I think having the assignment restriction in place for bug supervisors is enough. I don't think we want to further restrict based on the type of team, since you can change the team according to your preferences or expectations. In other words, it doesn't make sense to me why you want an open team to be bug supervisor in the first place.

Cheers,
deryck

[Vish (vish)]

@deryck:, Hi, you seem to have mixed up the team names here. There are two teams in question here:

Papercutters team is *Moderated* -> Bug supervisor [https://launchpad.net/~papercutters]

_Papercuts_ _Ninja_ team is the *Open* team. [https://launchpad.net/~papercuts-ninja]

The same problem can arise if someone from the Ubuntu users team assigns a bug to the open team. [https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-users]. That would spam 1430 users.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

We discussed on IRC and I understand better the request here. The mention of the bug supervisor team threw me off the scent of the real issue here. The issue here is that an open team can assign a bug to itself, and Vish wants us to restrict the assign to self feature further to exclude allowing assigning a bug to open groups that you belong to.

The arguments for this are that open groups contain inexperienced members who cannot speak for the entire group or realize that assigning a bug is not the right course of action. And that this can create noise in the bug, noise on an open group mailing list, and so on.

I'm still not convinced we should further limit assigning bugs this way. It will create work for small, open teams that then have to go change the team type to be able to assign bugs to themselves again. I'd like to know how much of a problem this really is before we commit to this, but I don't mind keeping the bug open to track the request. I wonder, too, if there isn't something that could make this better, before going the full route of banning open teams from assigning bugs to themselves.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

There is another case where we are certain that open-teams and bugs should not interact. Private and security bugs are compromised when open teams are assigned or subscribed. This scenario should be blocked.

I think the argument about experience is important and relates to several very old issues we have yet to solve. The primary issue is "Who speaks for a project/team". In the case of a team, the answer is the owner and admins. In the case of a project, it may be the owner, drivers, and bug supervisor. I expect users who have a specific role do speak for the team and thus can assign bugs. Consider that I cannot assign my team to a bug unless I admin it. Why does assignment have weaker restrictions?

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

My second to last statement made no sense. I meant
Consider that I cannot subscribe my team to a bug unless I admin it. Why does assignment have weaker restrictions? I should only be permitted to assign a bug to a team I admin.

[Vish (vish)]

@deryck: I'm not sure as to how widespread this problem is, I'm not a member of too many open teams..
Bug #711396 is another example of this problem.
Ayatana Discussion (https://launchpad.net/~ayatana) is an open team and the newest member(ks64) just joined and accidentally assigned the team to the bug, spamming 500+ members.

IMO, We limit this function, either by restricting Open team members from assigns Or
 we could add an option for the team admins to set a preference for this. Default being OFF, and the team admins can just turn it ON if they want. This should probably address your concern regarding the smaller teams.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

It seems to me that part of the story here is that very inexperienced users should not be able to assign bugs at all. In other bugs they cause trouble by assigning bugs to themselves or removing existing assignments.