Comment 23 for bug 333521

Please think this through very seriously before letting it go into
production. Perhaps it needs to go through some kind of review
process. If there is any kind of red button for UI review, consider
it pushed.

When this feature was originally turned on ~2 years ago, it caused a
great amount of bug spam and much consternation to users. The
Launchpad team ended up issuing a public apology
<http://<email address hidden>/msg02379.html>.
 I don't want to see that repeated.

On 20 April 2010 12:10, Curtis Hovey <email address hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 00:17 +0000, Martin Pool wrote:
>> On 19 April 2010 20:48, Deryck Hodge <email address hidden> wrote:
>> > I had not considered disabling this for all projects.  Thinking about it
>> > now, I'm not sure we should do that.  If we didn't set this by default
>> > when the feature was originally launched, then I don't think we would
>> > want to disable it automatically now.  Presumably, people who enabled
>> > this feature wanted it.
>
> We have been promoting this feature in the UI for two years. We also
> have users wondering why expirable bugs do not expire. Though the UI
> counts down from 60 days based on bug history, it will in fact continue
> to count after the expiration mark is reached:
> https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/malone/+bug/127348

Yes, I know all this. I've wondered myself why things were not
working in the way the UI says they would, and iirc I updated the help
wiki myself to explain that it was disabled.

I'm glad you're reenabling the feature, I just want you to reenable it
in a way that will please rather than annoy users.

It's bad to have a UI control present for 2+ years that does nothing.
It's worse to make it suddenly turn back on and abruptly catch up on
past data.

>> Or were wondering what it did, or it was set by somebody years ago
>> who's now left the project.
>
> I expire bugs every month by hand. There are no complaints. Most of the
> bugs I have expired I inherited from other Lp projects. There are
> discussions about follow up, and I have reopened a few bugs *after* the
> user could help explain how to reproduce this problem.

I presume you mean you manually expire Malone bugs. That's fine. I
would be very unhappy if you suddenly decided you were going to expire
all the bzr bugs that you thought were inactive. I expect the
unhappiness will come from Launchpad-using developers, not from the
users whose bugs are closed.

>> I suspect most users don't regularly read the blog or the mailing
> list.
>
> I expect users to read their own bugs.

If they read the bugs they'll find about the expiry after everything
has been done. I don't think doing bulk changes with no prior warning
is very nice.

>> What's the worst that could happen?  If you leave them turned on,
>> massive email spam and complaints.  If you turn them off and then let
>> people turn them back on, the worst is a few people needing to find
>> from this bug that they need to turn it back on.
>
> The email makes it clear which needs to be updated

People won't see the email until all their old bugs have been expired.

Though this does suggest an alternative which is that you could send
mail to all bug supervisors with this flag turned on, telling them
that a week from now it will start working.

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>