Re: bug tracker spam

[Don Armstrong <don@donarmstrong.com>]

On Sat, 31 May 2008, Glenn Morris wrote:
> Don Armstrong wrote:
> > Just mail me; I use rm. ;-)
> 
> It would be nice if getting rid of spam was something maintainers
> could do. Perhaps just tagging things as spam so that they appear in
> a separate section of the summary until they are fully removed.

Usually we use a cgi script so people can mark bugs that contain or
are spam, and an administrator manually removes them later. The reason
why this shouldn't be handled by maintainers is that it's the only
action that cannot be reverted in the bts. [I suppose that eventually
I'll have to come up with a method that scales better than the current
ones, but it's scaled to > 450,000 bugs in Debian, and there are a
bunch of things that need fixing which are higher on my priority
list.]

> more spam: #304, #340

Deleted.

> There are also things like #312, #313, #207 that seem to be mistakes.
> I don't know what to do about those.

Anything that's not clearly spam, I suggest to keep. [They'll
disappear from the main page as they get archived, so it won't be a
problem long-term.]

> Couple of other questions:
> 
> How do I close a report in such a way that it is marked "this is not
> a bug"? This isn't the same as "wontfix", IMO.

You just close it, explaining that it's not a bug and why in the -done
message. [A lot of the -done messages I've seen so far have been far
too terse to extract any useful information from; it makes it really
useful if a done message includes at least the commit message that
caused a bug to be fixed and the revision.]

If this happens a lot, we can add a notabug tag.

> How do you (or will you) control who is allowed to manipulate bug
> reports?

We don't, generally speaking, because controlling it doesn't scale. If
there's a problem, we can blacklist people. [I have all of about 5
entries in Debian's blacklist out of tens of thousands who have
modified bugs, so it's rarely a problem.]


Don Armstrong

-- 
After the first battle of Sto Lat, I formulated a policy which has
stood me in good stead in other battles. It is this: if an enemy has
an impregnable stronghold, see he stays there.
 -- Terry Pratchett _Jingo_ p265

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu