Voting in BMO

[Mark Côté]

In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of
bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of
questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure
everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map,
over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has
made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down
at least a bit if I can.

To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is
enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard
many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really
being used to prioritize features & fixes. If your team uses voting,
I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes
sense to continue to support this feature.

Thanks,
Mark

[Chris Peterson]

I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail
without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's "real"
CC list.


chris

[Xidorn Quan]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 9:09 AM, Mark Côté <mc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of
> bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of
> questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure
> everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map,
> over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has
> made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down
> at least a bit if I can.
>

That sounds good.

> To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is
> enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard
> many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really
> being used to prioritize features & fixes. If your team uses voting,
> I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes
> sense to continue to support this feature.
>

I'll vote not to remove voting. Although I don't see it is used to
prioritize features or fixes, I feel it is still a good channel to know
what users want without letting them spam in comments.

Conversely, I suggest we move back the link to "My Votes" somewhere, so
that we can get to that page more easily.

- Xidorn

[Jason Duell]

I've never seen votes make a real difference in the 6 years I've been
around on Bugzilla. The one use case I can think for keeping them is as an
"escape valve" for user frustration on old, long-standing bugs like

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41489

I.e. when people start griping about "I can't believe lame Mzilla hasn't
fixed this yet" we can tell people to vote instead of filling the comments
with complaints. But that's a rare case and I'm not sure it's worth
keeping voting just for that.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Chris Peterson <cpet...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

> _______________________________________________
> dev-platform mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
>



--

Jason

[Sören Hentzschel]

On 09.06.15 23:24, Chris Peterson wrote:
> I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail
> without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's "real"
> CC list.

Same here. Removing the voting feature means that I will cause a lot of
email spam in the future. :) I have currently 2271 active votes, I add
almost every day new votes or remove my votes from fixed bugs. I use the
voting feature as subscribtion feature. ;)

[Justin Dolske]

On 6/9/15 2:24 PM, Chris Peterson wrote:

> I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail
> without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's "real"
> CC list.

I think if Bugzilla, with its long and complex history, ever has a hope
of being untangled into something better, we can't keep every feature
because of all the possible ways it might be used. :)

Here, I'd suggest that the default should be to _not_ send emails for CC
changes, unless a user opts into it (and maybe even not even for that,
it's just spammy for anyone managing lots of bugs. But baby steps...).
Net improvement, no matter what happens with voting.

I'd agree that voting could be removed. Most people know that it was
added as a way to counter "+1!" type comments. But I'd counter that (1)
it's unclear that it's very effective in that role and (2) I've rarely
actually seen people telling people to use voting.

We have better tools now with the ability to tag and hide comments
(https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/comment_tagging) which I _do_ see used
frequently, as well as the ability to entirely disable commenting on
bugs in extenuating circumstances. I'd like to see those further improved.

That said, there are much bigger issues with Bugzilla's UI, and removing
voting is probably the smallest possible improvement. But it's probably
easy to just disable it for a while, and see what happens?

Justin

[Mark Côté]

So, this is a separate issue--whether users should get CC notifications
by default (you can turn them off right now in at least a couple
different ways). Keeping voting around just as a way to CC yourself
quietly seems suboptimal.

Mark

[Mark Côté]

On 2015-06-09 5:24 PM, Xidorn Quan wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 9:09 AM, Mark Côté <mc...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
>> In a quest to simplify both the interface and the maintenance of
>> bugzilla.mozilla.org, we're looking for features that are of
>> questionable value to see if we can get rid of them. As I'm sure
>> everyone knows, Bugzilla grew organically, without much of a road map,
>> over a long time, and it experienced a lot of scope bloat, which has
>> made it complex both on the inside and out. I'd like to cut that down
>> at least a bit if I can.
>>
>
> That sounds good.

One big hurdle is that *every* feature in Bugzilla has at least one
person who likes it. Some people are going to have to make sacrifices
if we are to cut down on complexity for the greater good. :)

>> To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is
>> enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard
>> many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really
>> being used to prioritize features & fixes. If your team uses voting,
>> I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes
>> sense to continue to support this feature.
>>
>
> I'll vote not to remove voting. Although I don't see it is used to
> prioritize features or fixes, I feel it is still a good channel to know
> what users want without letting them spam in comments.

I would ask, then, what the purpose of the feature is. If we know it
isn't used to make decisions, why use it? The only thing I can think of
is as a sort of "spam honeypot", to get people to not "+1" or "me too"
bugs, but this seems strange at best and actively misleading at worst.

Mark

[Adam Roach]

On 6/9/15 17:00, Justin Dolske wrote:
> On 6/9/15 2:24 PM, Chris Peterson wrote:
>
>> I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail
>> without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's "real"
>> CC list.
>
> I think if Bugzilla, with its long and complex history, ever has a
> hope of being untangled into something better, we can't keep every
> feature because of all the possible ways it might be used. :)

OBxkcd: http://xkcd.com/1172/

/a

[R Kent James]

On 6/9/2015 2:09 PM, Mark Côté wrote:
> If your team uses voting,
> I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes
> sense to continue to support this feature.
>
> Thanks,
> Mark
>

I've always considered voting as an important feature for Thunderbird
bugs. Yes it is not a statistically valid sample of your users, but that
does not mean it is useless. A bug with 200 votes has made a statement
that a bug with 1 vote has not. I regularly do searches for bugs,
limiting myself to bugs that have more than X number of votes.

Without voting, how do you direct users to express an interest in seeing
a bug solved without adding a "me too" comment?

Kent James

[Axel Hecht]

I recall that at least one group actively uses votes to prioritize stuff.

I can't really tell which one, I'm leaning towards devtools, but I don't
have any data to back that up.

I mostly remember because I was surprised.

Also, for a component like devtools, I can see how it'd make sense.

Axel

[Dave Camp]

We don't use bugzilla votes as a strong signal for prioritization on
devtools.

We do actually keep an eye on votes in some other channels (
ffdevtools.uservoice.com), but I don't think anyone on devtools would
object strongly to votes going away in bugzilla.

-dave

[Joshua Cranmer 🐧]

On 6/9/2015 4:09 PM, Mark Côté wrote:
> To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is
> enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard
> many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really
> being used to prioritize features & fixes. If your team uses voting,
> I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes
> sense to continue to support this feature.

I weakly object to removing the feature. I've used voting in the past to
avoid CC spam and more recently to get different email notification
levels. Actually, my biggest problem with using votes in queries is that
I don't care about the actual number of votes so much as I care about
the vote rate: A bug filed last month with 5 votes is something that
requires prompt attention while a bug filed 15 years ago with 20 votes
typically means "this is a hard-to-implement feature for a rare case" or
some other similar rationale that makes it not worth including in list
priorities.

--
Joshua Cranmer
Thunderbird and DXR developer
Source code archæologist

[Dale Harvey]

I have seen voting being recommended as alternative to +1's which is a
plus, we have never used them to prioritise although not sure our area of
bugs is popular enough to be using votes in that way.

As a developer of a bugzilla client however I have see a major missing
feature being the ability to favourite bugs in bugzilla., not to cc and get
a baggage of email but somewhere you can keep check on a list of bugs you
have an interest in, personally I make a meta bug and block it with bugs I
am interested in (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=965185) but
I could see "vote" being re purposed as favourite very easily

On 10 June 2015 at 00:06, Dave Camp <dc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> We don't use bugzilla votes as a strong signal for prioritization on
> devtools.
>
> We do actually keep an eye on votes in some other channels (
> ffdevtools.uservoice.com), but I don't think anyone on devtools would
> object strongly to votes going away in bugzilla.
>
> -dave
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 3:48 PM, Axel Hecht <l1...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>

[Mark Côté]

On 2015-06-09 6:00 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:
> That said, there are much bigger issues with Bugzilla's UI, and removing
> voting is probably the smallest possible improvement. But it's probably
> easy to just disable it for a while, and see what happens?

Indeed, it's a minor thing. Consider it a test for future feature
removals. ;)

There are other on-going efforts to improve UX, such as the "modal" UI,
which, in addition to being a cleaner interface, is also a platform for
further experimentation.

Mark

[Ehsan Akhgari]

I cannot remember a single instance where I or someone who I know has
used the number of votes on a bug as an input for making a decision, and
that is for good reason, since the number of votes tell you nothing
about how severe a problem actually is, and everything about, well, how
many people have voted for it.

I have however seen people on few occasions recommending angry users to
"vote" for a bug, mostly as a way to make them stop complaining. I find
that dishonest and distasteful, if not meant as a joke.

On the question of voting instead of CCing to reduce spam, I have
decided long time ago that it is the responsibility of other people to
opt in to not receive emails for CC changes if they wish so, not mine.
I CC myself on bugs mercilessly. ;-)

I have heard some people use votes as way to only get bugmail when a bug
gets resolved, for example, after having customized their Bugzilla
settings. That is a valid use case, but it is at best a gross hack, and
if the decision were up to me, I wouldn't keep votes for this use case.

[Byron Jones]

Dale Harvey wrote:
> As a developer of a bugzilla client however I have see a major missing
> feature being the ability to favourite bugs in bugzilla., not to cc and get
> a baggage of email but somewhere you can keep check on a list of bugs you
> have an interest in, personally I make a meta bug and block it with bugs I
> am interested in (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=965185) but
> I could see "vote" being re purposed as favourite very easily

this feature exists and is called "bug tagging".

you'll need to enable it via the prefs page (it's disabled by default
because the ux needs some love).

https://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.2/en/html/query.html#individual-buglists
(section 5.5.5).


-glob

--
byron jones - :glob - bugzilla.mozilla.org team lead -

[Byron Jones]

Dale Harvey wrote:
> As a developer of a bugzilla client however I have see a major missing
> feature being the ability to favourite bugs in bugzilla., not to cc and get
> a baggage of email but somewhere you can keep check on a list of bugs you
> have an interest in, personally I make a meta bug and block it with bugs I
> am interested in (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=965185) but
> I could see "vote" being re purposed as favourite very easily

[Eric Shepherd (Sheppy)]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 5:09 PM, Mark Côté <mc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is
> enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard
> many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really
> being used to prioritize features & fixes. If your team uses voting,
> I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes
> sense to continue to support this feature.
>

​We used voting for a while on the MDN platform project, but the process
changed a year or so ago and they're not actively being used anymore, I
think.​

​I found it to be a pretty neat feature, frankly. I use it for personal
projects on my own Bugzilla for shareware stuff I do for retro machines.​


--

Eric Shepherd
Senior Technical Writer
Mozilla
Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sheppy

[Justin Dolske]

On 6/9/15 7:09 PM, Ehsan Akhgari wrote:

> I cannot remember a single instance where I or someone who I know has
> used the number of votes on a bug as an input for making a decision, and
> that is for good reason, since the number of votes tell you nothing
> about how severe a problem actually is, and everything about, well, how
> many people have voted for it.

+1.

(omgwait, how do I vote for a email?!)

I think that this is where someone's supposed to point out that the #1
most-voted-for bug is the MNG bug. And #2 is "implement W3C XForms in
browser and composer".

Justin

[Byron Jones]

Byron Jones wrote:
> this feature exists and is called "bug tagging".
>
> you'll need to enable it via the prefs page (it's disabled by default
> because the ux needs some love).
>
> https://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.2/en/html/query.html#individual-buglists
> (section 5.5.5).

i should add that the plan for this is to make it much more discoverable.

this will likely involve renaming it to "favourites" (or similar) to
better reflect the personal nature of these lists, and a complete
overhaul of its user interface.

[Wayne]

On 6/9/2015 6:00 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:
> On 6/9/15 2:24 PM, Chris Peterson wrote:
>
>> I vote for bugs as a polite (sneaky?) way to watch a bug's bugmail
>> without spamming all the other CCs by adding myself to the bug's "real"
>> CC list.
>
> I think if Bugzilla, with its long and complex history, ever has a hope
> of being untangled into something better, we can't keep every feature
> because of all the possible ways it might be used. :)
>
> Here, I'd suggest that the default should be to _not_ send emails for CC
> changes, unless a user opts into it (and maybe even not even for that,
> it's just spammy for anyone managing lots of bugs. But baby steps...).
> Net improvement, no matter what happens with voting.
>
> I'd agree that voting could be removed. Most people know that it was
> added as a way to counter "+1!" type comments.

I've never heard such a thing. However, if it does that, then it does
have a purpose - one that I'd just as soon keep until an alternative is
offered that doesn't require monitoring and work. (which tagging,
mentioned below, does require)

> But I'd counter that (1)
> it's unclear that it's very effective in that role and (2) I've rarely
> actually seen people telling people to use voting.

(1) may be true only for projects that don't use it. (2) should held
against the feature because ___?

> We have better tools now with the ability to tag and hide comments
> (https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/comment_tagging) which I _do_ see used
> frequently, as well as the ability to entirely disable commenting on
> bugs in extenuating circumstances. I'd like to see those further improved.

We can all agree we'd rather not see unhelpful comments nor have to deal
with them. Personally I'd rather not have to tag unuseful comments.

> That said, there are much bigger issues with Bugzilla's UI, and removing
> voting is probably the smallest possible improvement. But it's probably
> easy to just disable it for a while, and see what happens?

I never have seen the voting UI as being the least bit distracting. So
I'd completely agree, other things in the UI are FAR more deserving of
attention and discussion.

[Mike Hommey]

The MNG bug also only has 698 votes. That doesn't even seem like a lot
considering it's #1 and considering the history of the bug.

Mike

[Mark Banner]

On 09/06/2015 23:19, R Kent James wrote:
> Without voting, how do you direct users to express an interest in seeing
> a bug solved without adding a "me too" comment?

Maybe the answer is that we don't. We just need to be honest - it would
be very difficult to create a fair system that could be used in a valid way.

Allowing votes by users that then don't actually get looked at or
considered, is just misleading the user who's taken the time to create
an account, sign-in and then vote.

Replying to this got me thinking - what about changing "vote" to "I have
this issue" similar to support.mozilla.org. However, I think the
usefulness would end up in the same way as voting.

As a suggestion though, how about adding something near the comment box
- like a checkbox or button which says "I have this issue and wish to
receive updates about it". If it was a checkbox, it could disable the
comment box.

I'm not sure if that could also be misleading, but the intention would
be to add an option for a user to give them something other than just
the comment box - which at the moment, is the only real obvious
"associate me" with this bug option.

Mark.

[Sören Hentzschel]

Regarding CC instead of voting, there is another issue. Voting is not
enabled in every component, so on these bugs I add me to the CC list.
But sometimes it happens that a bug will be marked as confidential after
I added me to the CC list. In that case I have still access to the not
public bug. This cannot happen with votes. It already happened more than
one time. ;)

[Archaeopteryx]

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff: Voting in BMO
Von: Mark Côté <mc...@mozilla.com>
An:
Datum: 2015-06-09 23:09

> To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is
> enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard
> many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really
> being used to prioritize features & fixes. If your team uses voting,
> I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes
> sense to continue to support this feature.
>
> Thanks,
> Mark

That would leave only relationship role to a bug (CC) which everybody
can use. I use CC for bugs where I have to read the comments and votes
where I am only interested if the status or dependency tree changes. If
I always have to CC myself, the increased bug mail count will make
reading bug mail more time consuming.

Sebastian

[Philipp Kewisch]

On 6/9/15 11:09 PM, Mark Côté wrote:
> To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is
> enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard
> many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really
> being used to prioritize features & fixes. If your team uses voting,
> I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes
> sense to continue to support this feature.

I have actually used votes in the past to aid decision making on what
feature to implement next. I am aware that votes will not tell me how
severe a normal bug is, but it does allow for prioritization of
enhancement bugs in moments where you think "ok, so what feature would
the user like to see next..."

I could live without this feature if the number of people on CC gives
some indication of how wanted a feature may be. Can you check
correlation between the number of votes and the number of people on CC?

Philipp

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 11:09 PM, Mark Côté <mc...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is
> enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard
> many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really
> being used to prioritize features & fixes. If your team uses voting,
> I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes
> sense to continue to support this feature.

Perhaps a good solution would be to morph voting into a less complex
feature. I.e., it could be more like GitHub stars, where you have a
way to note your interest without retrieving regular updates; just a
binary state for every user/issue, with a single clickable UI element.

Similarly, I could imagine that the very explicit CC list could be
changed to be more like a Follow button, plus a (simplified) way to
include others for those who have relevant privileges.

Cheers,

Dirkjan

[Philipp Kewisch]

On 6/10/15 1:24 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> Similarly, I could imagine that the very explicit CC list could be
> changed to be more like a Follow button, plus a (simplified) way to
> include others for those who have relevant privileges.

Have you seen the experimental bugzilla UI? It has a "follow" button.

https://globau.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/bmo-new-look/

Philipp

[Philipp Kewisch]

On 6/10/15 1:24 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:

> Similarly, I could imagine that the very explicit CC list could be
> changed to be more like a Follow button, plus a (simplified) way to
> include others for those who have relevant privileges.

[Mike Hoye]

On 2015-06-10 3:55 AM, Mark Banner wrote:
>
> Replying to this got me thinking - what about changing "vote" to "I
> have this issue" similar to support.mozilla.org. However, I think the
> usefulness would end up in the same way as voting.
>
> As a suggestion though, how about adding something near the comment
> box - like a checkbox or button which says "I have this issue and wish
> to receive updates about it". If it was a checkbox, it could disable
> the comment box.

For what it's worth, I think that the combination of this and disabling
notification for cc changes is a pretty strong idea, even if doesn't
quite achieve the holy grail of feature removal.


- mhoye

[Mark Côté]

On 2015-06-09 11:58 PM, Wayne wrote:
>> That said, there are much bigger issues with Bugzilla's UI, and removing
>> voting is probably the smallest possible improvement. But it's probably
>> easy to just disable it for a while, and see what happens?
>
> I never have seen the voting UI as being the least bit distracting. So
> I'd completely agree, other things in the UI are FAR more deserving of
> attention and discussion.

Just imagine the fun we're going to have when we bring up changing or
removing anything decidedly less trivial. :D

In all seriousness, this thread has brought up a number of interesting
points. Removing the feature may have been my original goal, but now
I'm realizing the strange ways that some features are (mis)used, and
that some of our existing features should be reoriented slightly to be
made better. This has been good user research.

Mark

[Robert Kaiser]

Philipp Kewisch schrieb:

> I could live without this feature if the number of people on CC gives
> some indication of how wanted a feature may be.

Well, I tend to CC myself to thing I seriously do not want to change but
really want to be informed about when they actually get done. I wouldn't
use votes for that. ;-)

KaiRo

[Mark Côté]

On 2015-06-10 7:06 AM, Philipp Kewisch wrote:
> I could live without this feature if the number of people on CC gives
> some indication of how wanted a feature may be. Can you check
> correlation between the number of votes and the number of people on CC?

A quick scan of the Core & Firefox products reveals a fairly high
correlation amongst bugs with many votes, around an average of 0.8 for
the top 10 most voted bugs, if my math is correct.

Unfortunately there's no easy way to search for the complement, i.e. if
bugs with high CC counts have lots of votes, but I think that is less
interesting (maybe?).

Mark

[Mark Côté]

Thanks for all the input on this feature. This was a good discussion.
Here's what I've learned:

* Almost no one makes decisions based on the number of votes
(Thunderbird and related may be an exception).
** Ergo, most users voting on bugs are probably being misled into
thinking their vote accomplishes anything.

* There is an idea that it cuts down on "me too" comments, but there's
no hard evidence. BMO also has more ways to hide or stop commenting
and to otherwise prevent abuse than it did a few years ago.

* Some people use voting as a way to silently CC themselves onto bugs,
i.e., to not trigger CC mail (but see my aside below).

* Some people are using voting to keep track of bugs without getting
much or any bugmail, presumably by unchecking most or all of the
"Voter" column in Email Preferences.

(Aside: the default for new users is to only get CC mail if you are the
reporter. Admittedly this can still be annoying, it's not immediately
obvious how to disable it, and the value of notifications on CC changes
is highly questionable.)

Thus it sounds like Voting is almost never used for its intended purpose
and could be actively misleading users. However, it also sounds like
people have discovered interesting alternative uses for it that could be
made more explicit, intuitive, and discoverable.

I think we can cut out Voting and enhance other features along these lines:

* Change bug tagging to something like "favouriting" (or a word with
less contentious spelling ;). Rework the UI to provide an obvious
way to both favourite a bug and to see your favourites list.

* Further improve it to only display updates since you last looked at
the list, something like the "Updated Since Last Visit" feature in My
Dashboard. Ideally this would eliminate the need to get any bugmail
about favourites, but we *could* add it to the email preferences,
defaulting to no bugmail (I'd prefer to just rely on a dashboard,
though).

* Turn off CC notifications entirely, with the possible exception of
when someone else CCs you on a bug.

* After those are in place, turn Voting off for most if not all
products.

Unless there are strong objections, we'll look into this in Q3. I
realize this is not a huge change, but it's yet another step to make
Bugzilla easier to use, particularly for new users. Look out for more
posts like this in the future.

Thanks,

Mark

[Mike Hommey]

Note, I think it's perfectly fine to still mention CCs in bugmail when
there is an accompanying comment, at least when the CC is not the person
who comments (in which case it's more than fine, it's possibly useful).

Mike

[Xidorn Quan]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 9:37 AM, Mark Côté <mc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

>
> * Change bug tagging to something like "favouriting" (or a word with
> less contentious spelling ;). Rework the UI to provide an obvious
> way to both favourite a bug and to see your favourites list.
>

...

> * After those are in place, turn Voting off for most if not all
> products.
>

It seems to be a good plan. I guess it would be great if you could migrate
all votes to favorite when you cut down Voting.

- Xidorn

[Gervase Markham]

On 09/06/15 23:07, Mark Côté wrote:
> I would ask, then, what the purpose of the feature is. If we know it
> isn't used to make decisions, why use it? The only thing I can think of
> is as a sort of "spam honeypot", to get people to not "+1" or "me too"
> bugs, but this seems strange at best and actively misleading at worst.

It used to do this job extremely well; I have no information on how true
that is today, as developers seem rather free to say "actually, we
ignore votes"...

Gerv

[Michael Verdi]

Here's something to consider. I've seen my friend Jen Simmons encourage
people to use voting as a way to tell us that it's important to them for
Firefox to support a particular html or css feature. Here's a recent
example https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/601184865732534272 - the bug
mentioned has 41 votes on it. I just did a little looking around and other
than adding a comment to the relevant bug the only other method of giving
us feedback seems to be to dump it in
https://input.mozilla.org/feedback/firefox

Maybe it's moot because we're not influenced by votes but if you're not a
mozilla insider how do express support for something without spamming the
bug?

- Michael

> _______________________________________________
> dev-platform mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
>

--
Michael Verdi • blog.mozilla.org/verdi • irc: verdi

[Steve Fink]

I agree. While it is certainly true that prioritizing work based on how
many noisy people are campaigning for it is not a good idea, I reject
the notion that the only useful goal here is to prevent bugspam, as that
implies that user input is worthless.

"me too"/+1 comments on bugs are clearly not the way to collect user
input. Votes aren't a whole lot better. input.mozilla.org is good for
certain things, but the SNR is too low to use it raw and the cost of
meaningful processing is high.

If I were to handwave up a new mechanism to replace bug comments +
voting, I'd probably want a feature/bug page with

- upvote/downvote counts (3 vs 100 is useful information, even if it
doesn't decide anything on its own)
- list of *distinct* reasons for wanting it
- counterarguments and data (eg web compat info)
- pointer to the appropriate discussion forum and threads

The idea is that if someone merely wants to support a feature request
but doesn't have any new arguments for why, they can upvote it and be
done. But if someone *does* have a novel argument, they can add it to
the list. Or expand/clarify an existing reason instead of just appending.

Come to think of it, that sounds like a wiki talk page with a fixed
format. Perhaps we could just throw up a template page on wiki.m.o and
find a good namespace for these, and redirect voters there?

On 06/11/2015 10:22 AM, Michael Verdi wrote:
> Here's something to consider. I've seen my friend Jen Simmons encourage
> people to use voting as a way to tell us that it's important to them for
> Firefox to support a particular html or css feature. Here's a recent
> example https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/601184865732534272 - the bug
> mentioned has 41 votes on it. I just did a little looking around and other
> than adding a comment to the relevant bug the only other method of giving
> us feedback seems to be to dump it in
> https://input.mozilla.org/feedback/firefox
>
> Maybe it's moot because we're not influenced by votes but if you're not a
> mozilla insider how do express support for something without spamming the
> bug?
>
> - Michael
>
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:
>

[Jared Wein]

DevTools does something like this with UserVoice. I don't think we should
get rid of voting unless we replace it with something else (UserVoice is a
good alternative).

There are plenty of people that recommend others to "vote" on bugs that
they want prioritized, and us removing voting will make it look to the
outsider that Mozilla is becoming more "closed".

Cheers,
Jared

[R Kent James]

On 6/11/2015 11:51 AM, Jared Wein wrote:
> There are plenty of people that recommend others to "vote" on bugs that
> they want prioritized, and us removing voting will make it look to the
> outsider that Mozilla is becoming more "closed".

If ignoring votes is a sign the Mozilla is "closed", and there is a
value that Mozilla be "open", I keep wondering if the real problem here
is that Mozilla is, in fact, too closed, and ignoring votes is one
evidence of that.

Maybe the correct fix is to start paying attention to votes.

:rkent

[Ehsan Akhgari]

On 2015-06-11 2:51 PM, Jared Wein wrote:
> DevTools does something like this with UserVoice. I don't think we should
> get rid of voting unless we replace it with something else (UserVoice is a
> good alternative).
>

> There are plenty of people that recommend others to "vote" on bugs that
> they want prioritized, and us removing voting will make it look to the
> outsider that Mozilla is becoming more "closed".

Well, but in most components, such recommendations are misleading since
developers pay little if any attention to votes. Personally I'd prefer
to not be redirected to /dev/null. :-)

[Mike Hoye]

On 2015-06-11 3:48 PM, R Kent James wrote:
> Maybe the correct fix is to start paying attention to votes.

If you choose your project priorities based on internet voting, you're
gonna have a bad time.

The word "vote" implies that the act of voting has a direct effect on
the outcome, which is clearly not the case here and really shouldn't be.
But that's probably the root of a lot of community frustration.

I definitely think that we need a low-friction, community-facing way to
express interest in a bug's outcome - maybe a list the only CC's
participants on status changes, but not on new comments? - but as it
stands voting isn't the right thing.


- mhoye

[Philipp Kewisch]

On 6/11/15 10:18 PM, Mike Hoye wrote:
> On 2015-06-11 3:48 PM, R Kent James wrote:
>> Maybe the correct fix is to start paying attention to votes.
> If you choose your project priorities based on internet voting, you're
> gonna have a bad time.

I don't think its about the complete list of project priorities,
certainly there are lots of issues that need to be done that users won't
vote for. I do think that at least once in a while it is good to rely on
votes for bringing features to the product that users want.

This does not strictly mean that you'd pick the very top item on the
list, but work your way down the list until you find something that
users want and fits into the general direction the project is heading in.

Philipp

[Chris Hofmann]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Mike Hoye <mh...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On 2015-06-11 3:48 PM, R Kent James wrote:
>

>> Maybe the correct fix is to start paying attention to votes.
>>

> If you choose your project priorities based on internet voting, you're
> gonna have a bad time.
>

> The word "vote" implies that the act of voting has a direct effect on the
> outcome,

I don't see is anything in the definition that implies direct effect
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vote

most of that is around the idea that a vote is an expression of opinion or
preference.

Seems like we don't need to, and haven't in many cases, implemented
features
or fixes with lots of votes but they at least deserve some kind of response
due to the
high level of interest, and that's generally what happens.

There are a few of us still round from the origin of many of these bugzilla
features
and for this one I think it was mostly just intended as a mechanism to
make sure we
had some ways to get a good collection of eyeballs on a particular issue
where lots
of people shared the same experience or ideas, and to make sure at least
some kind of response was in place that explained the reason for doing,
or not doing, some course of action.

Based on that you might come away with a different opinion that voting
was working and serving a valuable service in its most simple form.

Its it just the case that we need to make it more clear that a vote means
"vote for this bug to get more people looking at and discussing this bug"?

It seems like the original proposal was to try and cut down on bugzilla
features
with the idea of trying to remove and simplify. Now its turned into yeah,
there is something
here that people want to be able to do here, but voting is not quite it,
and it might
deserve more investigation and feature work to really solve "the real"
problem.

That seems like its leading more towards taking something simple like the
voting feature
we have now and turning it into something more complex. That's an
interesting
turn in the discussion and something you are likely to run into as you try
to examine
more bugzilla features.

-chofmann

> which is clearly not the case here and really shouldn't be. But that's
> probably the root of a lot of community frustration.
>
> I definitely think that we need a low-friction, community-facing way to
> express interest in a bug's outcome - maybe a list the only CC's
> participants on status changes, but not on new comments? - but as it stands
> voting isn't the right thing.
>
>
> - mhoye
>
>
>
>

[L. David Baron]

On Thursday 2015-06-11 11:13 -0700, Steve Fink wrote:
> If I were to handwave up a new mechanism to replace bug comments + voting,
> I'd probably want a feature/bug page with
>
> - upvote/downvote counts (3 vs 100 is useful information, even if it
> doesn't decide anything on its own)
> - list of *distinct* reasons for wanting it
> - counterarguments and data (eg web compat info)
> - pointer to the appropriate discussion forum and threads

For what it's worth, I'd pay more attention to votes if I could see
the graph of how vote counts changed over time. I'd be much more
inclined to believe votes that have increased steadily over time
(from people independently deciding that something was important)
than votes that increased in big jumps (because one person decided
that it was important and did a good job of convincing others to
vote for the bug).

I have occasionally looked at the list of most-voted-for bugs to see
if there were important things to prioritize that we were forgetting
about, but it's probably been a few years since I've done so.

-David

--
𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
- Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)

[Mark Côté]

The original intention for voting doesn't seem to be widely understood
or respected, as I believe you are saying. So we either need to somehow
communicate this intention more widely, or abandon it. Unless someone
is going to step up for the former, I would go with the latter.

Furthermore, since bugs with lots of votes also have lots of CCs (see an
earlier post of mine), if we want to just acknowledge that a bug is
popular, we can just use CC counts above a certain threshold.
Admittedly there's no way to search for that, but it wouldn't be hard to
add.

>
> It seems like the original proposal was to try and cut down on bugzilla
> features
> with the idea of trying to remove and simplify. Now its turned into yeah,
> there is something
> here that people want to be able to do here, but voting is not quite it,
> and it might
> deserve more investigation and feature work to really solve "the real"
> problem.
>
> That seems like its leading more towards taking something simple like the
> voting feature
> we have now and turning it into something more complex. That's an
> interesting
> turn in the discussion and something you are likely to run into as you try
> to examine
> more bugzilla features.

My plan is not to transform something simple into something complex. I
still think we can ditch voting. What I am proposing is taking an
existing feature--bug tagging--which is not widely used (too complex,
not discoverable) and make it simpler and better to replace the strange
misuse of voting that has arisen (watching bugs without email, that is,
creating a favourites list). In addition, I want to turn off most CC
notifications.

That's going to be one of my strategies for examining Bugzilla
features--figuring out where can we combine and simplify features, and
where we can replace a useless or misused feature with something more
obvious.

Mark

[Chris Hofmann]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 2:38 PM, Mark Côté <mc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

>
> >
> > There are a few of us still round from the origin of many of these
> bugzilla
> > features
> > and for this one I think it was mostly just intended as a mechanism to
> > make sure we
> > had some ways to get a good collection of eyeballs on a particular issue
> > where lots
> > of people shared the same experience or ideas, and to make sure at least
> > some kind of response was in place that explained the reason for doing,
> > or not doing, some course of action.
> >
> > Based on that you might come away with a different opinion that voting
> > was working and serving a valuable service in its most simple form.
> >
> > Its it just the case that we need to make it more clear that a vote means
> > "vote for this bug to get more people looking at and discussing this
> bug"?
>
> The original intention for voting doesn't seem to be widely understood
> or respected, as I believe you are saying. So we either need to somehow
> communicate this intention more widely, or abandon it. Unless someone
> is going to step up for the former, I would go with the latter.
>
>

Seems like a pretty simple change to just add text around the vote
link/button

change:
(vote
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=voting/user.html&bug_id=984012#vote_984012>
)

to (vote to help raise visablity
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=voting/user.html&bug_id=984012#vote_984012>
)

> Furthermore, since bugs with lots of votes also have lots of CCs (see an
> earlier post of mine), if we want to just acknowledge that a bug is
> popular, we can just use CC counts above a certain threshold.
> Admittedly there's no way to search for that, but it wouldn't be hard to
> add.
>
>

yeah, it seem reasonable that there might be correlation between
votes and cc lists at some steady state of the bug.

one interesting question is which one is the leading indicator
and which one is the lagging indicator.

1) do people add to the cc list as the result of finding
bugs with rising vote counts?

or 2) is the reverse happening that we have bugs with with big cc
lists in which people then start voting on.

or 3) is the growth in both uniform for bugs with large vote counts?

If its 1 (or maybe 3) then the system is working pretty much as originally
designed.

If its the later then votes might be just piling on and we
can leverage other indicators to give us the same info.

does the action of a vote currently add one to the cc list by default?

the ability to follow components and people also came
after voting and might also lead to a disconnect between
how many people are on the cc list of a random bug
that comes in and starts to get voted up. that could
be valuable for new features that have just been added
that might get votes, but the component does not yet
have a big component following.

-chofmann

[Daniel Veditz]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Mike Hoye <mh...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> The word "vote" implies that the act of voting has a direct effect on the

> outcome, which is clearly not the case here and really shouldn't be. But

> that's probably the root of a lot of community frustration.
>

​Forums like Reddit and StackOverflow use "upvoting" to great benefit. If
you think it's a democratic "vote" that has a specified result if you "win"
then you'll be disappointed; if you realize it's the same thing as various
other site's ways to express interest/support​
​ then it starts to make more sense.

I definitely don't think "votes" should dictate what we implement, but I
also think Mozilla should pay more attention to votes than we do. They flag
pain points. The picture would be clearer if we had "downvotes" too (e.g.
the previously mentioned MNG bug would paint a different picture if you
could see it's "really contentious" rather than "really popular").

-Dan Veditz

[R Kent James]

On 6/11/2015 4:59 PM, Daniel Veditz wrote:
> Forums like Reddit and StackOverflow use "upvoting" to great benefit. If
> you think it's a democratic "vote" that has a specified result if you "win"
> then you'll be disappointed; if you realize it's the same thing as various
> other site's ways to express interest/support​
> ​ then it starts to make more sense.
>
> I definitely don't think "votes" should dictate what we implement, but I
> also think Mozilla should pay more attention to votes than we do. They flag
> pain points. The picture would be clearer if we had "downvotes" too (e.g.
> the previously mentioned MNG bug would paint a different picture if you
> could see it's "really contentious" rather than "really popular").
>
> -Dan Veditz

++

:rkent

[Joshua Cranmer 🐧]

On 6/11/2015 3:57 PM, L. David Baron wrote:
> For what it's worth, I'd pay more attention to votes if I could see
> the graph of how vote counts changed over time.

I explicitly want to call out attention to this. In my experience, it's
not the absolute vote count that matters but rather the vote velocity.

--
Joshua Cranmer
Thunderbird and DXR developer
Source code archæologist

[Jonas Sicking]

Indeed. It feels pretty dishonest of us to keep a voting feature that
isn't payed attention to.

I also don't think it works as a way to stop people from adding '+1'
comments. All bugs that I've seen that get enough votes that +1
comments would have been distracting, *also* get enough +1 comments
that the bug effectively becomes useless.

/ Jonas

[Mark Côté]

On 2015-06-11 6:43 PM, Chris Hofmann wrote:
>> Furthermore, since bugs with lots of votes also have lots of CCs (see an
>> earlier post of mine), if we want to just acknowledge that a bug is
>> popular, we can just use CC counts above a certain threshold.
>> Admittedly there's no way to search for that, but it wouldn't be hard to
>> add.
>>
>>
> yeah, it seem reasonable that there might be correlation between
> votes and cc lists at some steady state of the bug.
>
> one interesting question is which one is the leading indicator
> and which one is the lagging indicator.

Unfortunately we don't keep voting history, so that would be hard to
tell. Here are a few more stats though:

For the combined products Core, Firefox, and Firefox for Android, there
are currently

* 81 234 open bugs
* 337 open bugs with greater than 25 votes.
* 4 of those were opened within the last year.
* of the top 10, the most recent was opened in 2005. 6 were opened
sometime in the year 2000 or earlier.

In the last 6 months, there were
* 20 129 bugs resolved.
* 11 154 of those resolved fixed.
* 11 of those had 25 or more votes, although one was reopened. Of the
other 10, half were fixed, two were duped, and 1 each invalid, wontfix,
and incomplete.
* the creation dates of the 10 resolved bugs ranges is scattered, with
two opened within the last year, and they were resolved invalid and
duplicate. Of the fixed bugs, they were opened in 2011, 2011, 2010,
2004, and 2000.

I get the point about acknowledging votes. But what value does that
really provide when (a) the number of highly voted bugs is actually
rather small, (b) the number of highly voted bugs that we close in a
6-month period is miniscule, and (c) the closed bugs range from 4 to 15
years old. In that light, these acknowledgements seem disingenuous.

Sure, this feature gives a little insight into a small number of issues
that a small number of users care about, but how much weight should we
give that compared to other forms of feedback, user research, and
marketing? The presence of this feature in Bugzilla implies it is
weighted much higher than it really is. I think we've outgrown its
usefulness.

Mark

(Anecdote: bug 35168 was one of those 10 bugs resolved in the last 6
months. It was opened in 2000. It seems that what finally prompted it
to be fixed was that Chrome does it properly.)

[Karl Tomlinson]

I would like to vote for voting.

[Michael Verdi]

> On Jun 12, 2015, at 12:35 AM, Karl Tomlinson <moz...@karlt.net> wrote:
>
> I would like to vote for voting.

+1 :)

But more seriously, maybe bugzilla isn’t the place for it. From twitter today https://twitter.com/codepo8/status/609294801289244672 <https://twitter.com/codepo8/status/609294801289244672>

#cssday features you would like to see in Microsoft Edge: ask for them: http://t.co/cBXp0JfUZF <http://t.co/cBXp0JfUZF> - what's in already: http://t.co/rhNXer92PC <http://t.co/rhNXer92PC>

This looks way more approachable that what we have. I have no idea how it looks and works from inside but from the outside, pretty nice.

- Michael

[Robert Kaiser]

Mark Côté schrieb:

> * Change bug tagging to something like "favouriting" (or a word with
> less contentious spelling ;). Rework the UI to provide an obvious
> way to both favourite a bug and to see your favourites list.

I actually think that "tagging" is an established way to call such a
feature, but we could have a "like" or "want" tag or so that's easy to
add, and the whole tagging UI needs a whole lot of rework (it's really
cumbersome to use - and I am using it quite a bit).

KaiRo

[Philip Chee]

On 10/06/2015 05:24, Xidorn Quan wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 9:09 AM, Mark Côté <mc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

>> To that end, I'd like to consider the voting feature. While it is
>> enabled on a quite a few products, anecdotally I have heard
>> many times that it isn't actually useful, that is, votes aren't really
>> being used to prioritize features & fixes. If your team uses voting,
>> I'd like to talk about your use case and see if, in general, it makes
>> sense to continue to support this feature.

> I'll vote not to remove voting. Although I don't see it is used to
> prioritize features or fixes, I feel it is still a good channel to know
> what users want without letting them spam in comments.

That doesn't work in that a high number of votes currently has no effect
on whether a bug gets fixed or not. Because developers never pay any
attention to that field (well OK *I* don't pay any attention that field).

I suggest that this feature be removed so that people don't have the
misplaced assumption that voting for a bug will get it fixed faster.

Alternatively if the decision is to keep this feature, someone should
periodically go through bugs with large number of votes and decide
whether to fast track or deep six each bug.


Phil

--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.

[Philip Chee]

Bug 666 wants to be your friend.

+------+ +------+
|Accept| |Reject|
+------+ +------+