Useless Comments on Bug Reports

[dobey]

There are often many bugs reported, which are hit by numerous users, or for which users feel the need to jump in and say "I also feel this way." Most of the time, users will add a useless comment about how they see the problem too, rather than simply clicking the "this also affects me" link, or will in fact, do both.

I propose that the Launchpad server does some simple parsing of posted comments, checking for common words and phrases in the comment, and for "me too" comments, simply rejects the comment text, and converts the post into an "affects me too", and subsequently "flash" the affected users count at the top, and scroll up, after the post has been made, to alert the user to its presence, and being altered by the user, much the same as if the user had simply clicked on it.

This would cut down significantly on the number of useless comments in bug reports, as well as the amount of useless mail as a result of it.

[Paul Hummer (rockstar)]

This affects me too.

[John Lenton (chipaca)]

Me too.

[Graham Binns (gmb)]

I'm marking this Won't Fix since it's far too complex to try and parse all the different versions of "affects me too." The code would be heinous and would be easy to get around.

[Graham Binns (gmb)]

(Apologies for going via Invalid to get to Won't Fix). PEBKAC there.

[Manish Sinha (मनीष सिन्हा) (manishsinha)]

I would suggest giving the "Driver" the permissions to delete comments.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

dupe of a five-digit bug 93285 (which is also currently wontfix). There is a real problem here that people add low-value comments, though keyword matching is likely not a good fix for it.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

Theres another bug entirely about useless conversations; I will dig it
up thursday if noone beats me to it. It *isn't* won't fix :)