From: Dominik Riebeling <dominik.riebeling_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:16:57 +0200

On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 3:18 PM, Antony Stone
<Antony.Stone_at_rockbox.open.source.it> wrote:
> It helps because if people search and find the idea is already there, they
> shouldn't enter it again.
>
> If they do, that's a problem of user education, not the idea itself being
> pointless.

While this is theoretically correct it doesn't work in practise -- we
can't educate the users, and if you want to know how stupid some users
are you just need to follow the tracker or forums for a while.
Especially for the tracker, quite some people posting feature requests
obviously haven't read the tracker guidelines. Just think of all those
requests for new ports. We can't do much more than adding a "yes, I've
read the guidelines" checkbox. But that will just get clicked, same as
people accept license agreements without actually reading them at all.

> When you say "kill" do you mean "delete so they can't be seen again" or "mark
> it as 'won't be done because X'" which can then be found if people search for
> the idea in future?

In Flyspray you don't delete entries completely but close them. Anyone
can still view them, and if you have the powers you can also reopen
them. But for feature requests this also means you need to put that
"rejected" label on it, and obviously you should have an argument why
you did so before doing it ;-)

> Perhaps the solution is to make entry to the tracker system for a new posting
> only possible after doing a search, and automatically including the terms the
> user searched for into a field in the posting?

I don't think this will work in practice. The only thing that would
work would be to allow only a small group to create new tasks and
filtering through the mailing lists first.


 - Dominik
Received on 2008-06-22