Comment 16 for bug 1734

I agree that it is not a good idea to let users delete their comments, since this could destroy the documentation of the bug, and it could also confuse matters if others' comments are suddenly left unexplained.

On the other hand, like John writes above, there are many examples of meaningless and redundant comments that might as well be deleted. These are my thoughts, that concur a lot with some of the other ideas that have been reported earlier in this discussion.

(1) I suggest that the commenter should be able to _hide_ their comments from the standard view, marked with a small icon in the margin so it could be expanded.

(2) It should be possible to edit your own comments. I have often wished I could add or correct something; usually the very moment you've hit "Save Changes" you realize an oops was made :-) The system of "Previous Version" is already in place in the "Edit Description/Tags" menu, and should be expanded to also work for comments. This would save history, but also make a more sensible interface for the users.

(3) It would be useful to give priority to the most valuable comments through a system of "votes" like on the brainstorm site. It would allow users to dynamically vote comments "up" or "down" according to their relevance, and would address the situation described by jdong. In addition, this relevance often changes during the processing of a bug report. Perhaps users should be able to define a lower vote limit for comments they would like to see (like on SlashDot). Such a system could replace (1).