[gentoo-dev] Re: Bug voting

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Jason Rhinelander posted <41069808.7040405@gossamer-threads.com>,
excerpted below,  on Tue, 27 Jul 2004 10:59:36 -0700:

> [V]otes would serve as a way for people to say "me too" without 
> actually cluttering up the bug report by typing "me too" into the 
> comment box.

IMO this is perhaps the important point.   The guidelines specifically say
/not/ to "me too" a bug, but sometimes it's tempting.  If there was a way
to vote for it instead, that would solve that problem.

In addition, I'm not sure if the vote is rigged this way by default, but
one could set it up such that it would notify on the first and second
vote, then not again until the fifth, then the tenth, etc.  In addition,
the vote reports, being automated and entirely predictable content, could
easily be filtered by devs not wishing to get them at all.  That of course
assumes that votes would be set to globally notify at all.

Gentoo's going to be rather different, but I came from Mandrake, where
each regular cooker tester/user got ten votes to spend as they wished each
month on bugzilla.  That kept the fakes down quite a bit, because one had
to actually participate in the process in ordered to get the ten vote
privilege.  One could still in theory participate under a bunch of names,
but that takes time.  A user could spend all ten votes on one thing if
they wanted, or spread them out to ten things.  I don't know if lower
level participants got say two votes, or if actual rpm contributors got
say 20, or not, but it could have been done.

Now some thinking in print..  As I said, Gentoo's different.  Perhaps
restrict general users to two votes a month.  Preventing ballot stuffing
might be problematic, as there's no way to limit registered nyms. 
However, regular reliable reporters and those contributing fixes might get
10 or 20 votes to use each month, an interesting recognition mechanism
short of dev-hood or the like.  If stuffing appears to be getting out of
hand, but not /entirely/ so, maybe up that to 50 or a hundred votes for
the reliable reporters and patch contributors, and while there'd be some
obvious vote inflation, equally obviously, they could effectively shout
down all but extreme stuffing.  One might also consider giving the legit
"super-voters" negative votes, costing the same vote points, but
subtracting votes, where abuse might be suspected.  A super-voter wouldn't
have to answer /why/ they voted something up or down, but abuse could be
curbed by revoking super-voter status, yanking vote points.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin



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