LP needs flagging of content for quality

[Jorge Castro]

Bug 45419 is about adding a spam flag and it's quite a narrow scope so I wanted to file this bug to see if there's anything we can do about the quality of content from comments.

Too often people are treating bugs as forums/mailing list threads than doing actual bug reporting, causing some developers to ignore the bug and then open a "real" bug where people can get work done. This is backwards, what we need is a flagging system (like craigslist or stackexchange) that allows participants to flag comments so we can keep the crap out of the system. Here's a quick proposal.

A (flag) button on each comment., clicking on it gives me a little ajaxy thing:

 * Me too! - This is a me too comment that doesn't help improve the bug's situation, but thanks for your +1 (when this flag is enacted the "Affects Me!" increments by one and then the comment is hidden).
 * Obsolete/Out of context - This comment no longer makes any sense or is a common symptom but not the right bug. (So we can remove bad workarounds and cases where people think it's the same bug due to a symptom but is not.)
 * Not constructive/Opinion - this comment doesn't help improve the bug's situation and is just noise/opinion. (This goes away when the bug turns into Opinion and then they all unhide)
 * Rude/Disruptive - this comment is not the type of behavior we accept here.
 * Spam (see bug 45419)

And then you just automate the voting, if a comment gets +3 on any of these it gets auto-hidden (except for spam, which should delete). At the bottom of the bug there should be a "show all comments" or something. If a certain user gets over X amount of rude/disruptive then their comment ability is removed for that project.

In cases where a person is misdownvoted (due to whatever user mob problem) an option to reopen (with needing like +3 votes) would be needed.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

An open voting system like stackexchange seems like it might be a bit overkill for lp. Simply letting members of bugcontrol hide the comments seems like it would be enough.

I mean, we don't take votes on setting the status, or editing the description, so why do so for moderating comments?

[Jorge Castro (jorge)]

There are only ~392 people in bug control and Ubuntu has 97429 open bugs -- that's 248 bugs per person, times the # of comments in each bug, I wouldn't want to click "Hide Comment" so often.

But whether it's open to the general public or a select few doesn't matter to me, as long as there is enough #'s that we can effectively clean it up without having everyone clicking Hide Comment all day.

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

More-open-than-bug-control but smaller than everybody could be "people with karma above X in $project"

[Juha Siltala (topyli)]

As a matter of curiosity and in order to put this in context, how real or common is the phenomenon of developers being caused to 'ignore the bug and then open a "real" bug where people can get work done'? I do believe it happens, but is there any research on how common it is?

In general, i would agree with the proposal, we do have too many useless comments and me-too's.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

I've duped tis on the original master we had.