Thread:Project talk:WikiProject Bug Squad/Bug hunters need an advocate authority/reply (2)

Hi Badon, yeah, I dislike 33403 reading that comment, but I have no idea about potential previous tension already at that time (two years ago) as I wasn't around at that time. I understand such comments are demotivating and I appreciate your rationale followup comment! For a few months now we have Bug management/Bugzilla etiquette in place which provides guidelines that everybody in Bugzilla should follow. If you face any hostility again, please notify me so I can take a look. For 33479 the term "INVALID" seems to be the problem? I prefer to not have too many bug resolutions that try to cover each potential situation (in this case maybe BUG_ALREADY_FIXED_WHEN_FILED), so there will always be some space left for interpretation that reporters and developers might disagree on, unfortunately. And "bad" bug reports happen to everybody, may they be duplicates or having been fixed already. These reports are not a problem and are still very welcome as they might provide more information and as each reporter's motivation clearly is to help and to make the project better. Decisions should be explained to reporters (as it happened in comment 1 and 3). I'd interpret FIXED as an identifiable code commit that was merged into the code repository after the report was filed, but this is not 100% clear in Bug management/Bug report life cycle either. Anyway, as I wrote above, I don't think we should over-define each resolution and end up coming up with lots of new ones trying to cover each potential situation as I don't see how this would help anybody. I understand the motivation to "keep score of the number of valid bug reports someone has contributed" but I don't think that some "success" ratio should be the main objective here - in the end nearly all bug reports are helpful, whatever resolution they end up with. I'd rather go with general activity in the bugtracker (e.g. helping by commenting to track down an issue also when you're not the reporter of it), which is currently being worked on as part of community metrics. Surely WMF could benefit from having more bug hunters, though I would replace "WMF" by "the Wikimedia community" and I'd expect this to be true for any free and open software project out there. Again, I am sorry that the process of bug handling is sometimes demotivating for some of the involved parties.