Re: Enable voting on Bugzilla? Redux -- MeToo Counter!

[Ryan McDougall <ryan mcdougall telusplanet net>]

Yes I know, its beating a dead horse, but I think I have a point.

On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 22:03 -0500, Seth Nickell wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-03-13 at 22:55, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > 
> > Basically, as long as the developers are ignoring the votes, it's just
> > a waste of the voter's time to have the capability turned on.

But the developers don't have to ignore them, in which case it isn't a
waste of time.

> 
> To be very forthright, its also asking for bad press when a bug with a
> hundred votes continues to not be fixed. A hundred (or whatever) votes
> also doesn't translate directly into high priority. This *could* be

While you may have a good argument that voting causes badness, the
simple reality is KDE has it, and it hasn't destroyed them, nor
perceptibly affected them negatively at all (based on my discussions
with some of them).

> useful information, but I've also seen "interest groups" (you might call
> them ;-) trying to strong arm developers using voting in Mozilla's
> bugzilla. Basically voting is prone to all the problems of a self
> selected sample in a poll.

People will stuff ballots, but if people understand that nothing is
binding, or all your interested in is the difference between a bug thats
affected 10 people vs. a bug affecting 1000, then I see no harm to
stuffing.

People will also bitch no matter what you do, but I am of the belief
that they will bitch less if the *feel* that they have been heard in
some manner. If my hypothesis is true, votes will actually decrease the
amount of bitching since people feel they have some formal voice.
Notice, not a *controlling* or *binding* voice. You would be surprised
how little some people are content with sociologically speaking.

> This problem could be alleviated by making the voting results visible
> only to gnome hackers (we already have a bit for this in bugzilla, but
> maybe that's hard to mix with controlling display of voting results? I
> have no clue).
> 
> -Seth
> 

I think people are getting too hung up on the word "vote", and I don't
blame them, its a powerful word with all sort of wonderful historical
connotations. Therefore I propose we turn on the "MeToo Counter"
features of bugzilla.

This way people know that the only purpose for their "MeToo" is so
developers can gauge the affect that bugs have on the population of bug
reporters, and in no way constitutes as binding result. Basically
another statistical field to add to the heap. That way a user is more
likely to look for duplicates (so he can vote^H^H^H^HMeToo), than to
file a duplicate bug in hopes of being heard when the bug is marked as a
duplicate.

ps. When will this thread die? ;) Its late, I'm out!

Cheers,
Ryan