BMO/comment tagging

Comment Tagging

A enhancement which allows you to tag individual comments with arbitrary strings has been deployed on bugzilla.mozilla.org.

Comment tags are saved immediately - you do not need to hit "Save Changes" but you do need to press Enter after selecting the tag from the popup.

Comment Tagging Features

Automatic Collapsing of Comments

The Bugzilla administrator can configure a list of comment tags which will result in those comments being collapsed by default when a bug is loaded.

This allows obsolete or irrelevant comments to be hidden from the information stream.

Currently tagging a comment as spam, duplicate, obsolete, me-too, advocacy, off-topic, offtopic, abuse, abusive, admin, or typo will trigger this.

Please use the right tags when reporting comments that violate our etiquette policies so that site admins can take the right actions and keep Bugzilla a friendly and spam-free place to report and track bugs.

spam: comments that look like someone's trying to game search results by adding links to unrelated sites to comments should be tagged as spam. Look out for comments of the form "I see this happening on my site too," as they may be spam and not additional information for a bug.

off-topic, offtopic, me-too, or advocacy: "me too", "fix this now!", "I can't believe this isn't important to Mozilla" and similar comments should be tagged with one of these. See our etiquette guide.

abuse, abusive, or admin: Flames, threats, name-calling, and slurs are abuse, and should be marked as such so they are brought to the attention of an admin.

duplicate, obsolete, and typo should only be use used to remove comments which are no longer relevant, contain outdated or incorrect information, or ones the author wishes to redact.

Our response to violations of Bugzilla etiquette depends on the type of violation. We don't want to treat someone who is unaware of how conversations work to be marked as a spammer, and we don't want to go uninformed about abuse.

Comment Grouping/Threading

Bugzilla shows a list of all comment tags in use on the bug, and clicking on a tag will expand those comments while collapsing all others.

This allows for simple threading of comments without diverging significantly from the current Bugzilla user interface, api, and schema. You can tag all comments relating to the same topic, and remove comments no longer relevant to that thread by removing the tag.

Highlighting Important Comments

On bugs with a lot of information, it can be time consuming for people not directly involved in the bug to find the relevant comments. Applying comment tags to the right comments assists this, and may negate the need for information to be gathered outside of Bugzilla.

For example:

• tagging a comment with “STR” (steps to reproduce) will help the QA team quickly find the information they need to verify the fix
• writing a comment summarising a new feature and tagging it with “docs” will help the generation of documentation for MDN or similar

Comment Tagging from Apps

Applications using our APIs can post tags to comments.

Bugherder

The bugherder application will post a comment on behalf of a user when they take an action:

• The bugherder tag indicates that the comment is from bugherder
• landing, backout, uplift describe the commit(s) being marked
• The app also posts the link to the commit message, and sets the appropriate release status flags

Implementation Notes

• the “add tag” input field has an auto-complete drop-down, drawing from existing tags weighted by usage count
• by default editbugs membership is required to add tags to comments
• comment tags are not displayed unless you are logged in to Bugzilla
• tags are added and removed via XHR, changes are immediately visible to the changer without refreshing the page
• tagging comments will not trigger bugmail, nor alter a bug’s last-modified date
• tags added by other users (or on other tabs) will generally not be visible without a page refresh
• See also the feature's implementation page BMO/Comment Tagging and bug 793963 where this got implemented.