Comment 8 for bug 412925

It may eventually be necessary to prevent people from changing the status of bug reports unless they either have an official role in the relevant project, or have met some other standard that shows they know what they're doing, for example having reported 5 bugs that ended up getting fixed in any Launchpad project.

But judging purely from personal experience, ;-) I expect that most of these changes are happening by accident rather than misguided intention. People are clicking on the value by accident, and then experiencing either bug 401683 (clicking again in exactly the same place changes the value when it shouldn't) or bug 399239 (it's not obvious how to cancel out of the popup).

So, I think this bug can be fixed in two steps:
1. Fix bug 401683.
2. Whenever someone changes a value using one of the pseudo-menus, show a pair of icon-only cancel and confirm buttons (✖)(✔) at the right end of the table cell.
    - If they click the cancel button, the cell should revert to its original value.
    - If they click the confirm button, the buttons should be replaced by a spinner, and the XHR stuff should happen.
    - If they just leave it like that and do nothing, no change should be committed.

You will need pairs of cancel and confirm buttons for inline editing of the project name and the assignee anyway, so having similar buttons for the Status, Importance, and cancel/confirm interface for milestone values would be consistent with that.