On 07/11/13 16:28, Quim Gil wrote:
The issue is the extra step for newcomers vs the risk of many extra steps for a few etablished contributors if someone decides to abuse the feature, as it happened in the past. And my point is that I personally don't believe that such barrier is diminishing the volume of actual contributions we receive.
In order to get somewhere with this discussion, it would be useful to know the current practice of other free software projects, using Bugzilla or not. As a newcomer, can I assign bugs to myself in GNOME, KDE, Ubuntu, Debian... etc?
Would that be useful, though? Generally what other free software projects do is what works for them, and it won't necessarily work for us. It is also most especially not necessarily good practice when it comes to actually attracting and keeping new folks, simply due to the nature of what free software often entails - somewhere along the line, there is usually a lack of resources, and it is newcomers who suffer the most.
As much as projects would like, and for that matter, need, new folks, they only have so much time to devote to it and especially when volunteers make up a bulk of the community people wind up spending most time on other things. Bugzilla lacks certain key features that would make it feasible to open up from the start, and my guess would be it has something to do with similar - it was simply not a priority, so it never happened.
For a rather extreme example, there was another project, some OS thing, that a friend of mine wanted to contribute to awhile back, but he found that they had disabled account creation entirely due to lack of resources to combat spam, requiring instead that you find them on IRC or some such and contact them that way for an account. In no way is this good practice, and has very much harmed them as well, and yet it was probably the best thing they could do with what they had.
Just please be careful when looking at what other people do, here. Why they did something can be far more important than what they actually did.