Hosted vs. placeholder projects are unhelpfully indistinct
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launchpad itself |
Triaged
|
Low
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Taken from a discussion with MPT:
The Launchpad collaboration model relies on the existence of placeholder
projects. But as far as we know, we have never designed how placeholder
projects should be presented or claimed, and we have not well considered
handling placeholder projects when new features (such as Answers) have
been added to Launchpad.
We will know this problem is fixed when:
* <https:/
* A test shows that most people (aim for over 75%) can tell, within 5 seconds of arriving at any of a project's Overview pages (e.g. <https:/
* A test shows that most people can tell, within 5 seconds of arriving at a project's Bugs page (e.g. <https:/
* A survey of maintainers of projects that don't use Launchpad shows that a large majority of them are happy with the way their project is represented in Launchpad.
* <https:/
* <https:/
| description: | updated |
| Changed in launchpad: | |
| status: | New → Confirmed |
| Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote Re: Active vs. placeholder projects are unhelpfully indistinct | #1 |
| Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote | #2 |
| Changed in launchpad-registry: | |
| importance: | Undecided → Wishlist |
| status: | Confirmed → Triaged |
| Changed in launchpad-registry: | |
| milestone: | none → series-10.05 |
| summary: |
- Active vs. placeholder projects are unhelpfully indistinct + Hosted vs. placeholder projects are unhelpfully indistinct |
Random implementation ideas:
The Overview page for a placeholder project could include "(placeholder)" in both its <title> (important for search engine results) and main heading, like the 43 People site's pages for celebrities who don't use 43 People. <http://
Where active projects have a description, placeholder projects could instead have a brief paragraph explaining why the project being in Launchpad at all. (I don't mean "This project was registered on <date> by <person>", but "Launchpad)
Similarly, the Bugs and Code pages for a project that doesn't use Bugs or Code could begin with a one- or two-sentence blurb explaining exactly why Launchpad is tracking bugs separately from the project's bug tracker (bug 35646) or branches separately from the project's VCS. This blurb would likely be a little different for projects that used Launchpad at all, vs. projects that were complete placeholders.
From discussion in bug 253360: Perhaps the project registration form should start out with radio buttons for "(*) a project I maintain" or "( ) a placeholder project that exists elsewhere". If you choose the former, you're shown as maintainer on the resulting project page; if you choose the latter, the maintainer isn't shown at all (bug 251834).