Over the past month, I've noticed a large number of bug reports getting their status changed to random values by people with no reason to touch the status at all, often resulting in the status of "fix released" bugs being reset. Discussing with folks on IRC brought to my attention that this coincides with the roll-out of a new ajax feature that I hadn't noticed up to now, which lets users change bug status with two clicks.
This is too easy of an interface.
Previously, users were always at least encouraged to comment when changing bug statuses, by virtue of the comment field above the 'submit' button. Now, with two clicks users can change a status and scarcely realize they've changed anything.
Colin Watson suggested on IRC that having an ajax 'comment on this change' box following the status change, and before submitting, would be enough to curb this problem. If that's not suitable, I think it would be better to disallow these new ajax status changes altogether.
We do indeed plan to add the option of commenting on the change after it's made, but it probably won't be compulsory. I don't think that the solution to this problem is making the interface harder to use. Instead, we should consider how to:
1. Discourage people who don't have the required information from changing the status of a bug.
2. Discourage people from clicking randomly (this might happen with time anyway, if the reason people are changing the status is that they wanted to try the new UI).
I'm marking this bug WONTFIX for now, but by all means, let's continue the discussion so that we can improve the interface.