1524884 - Clarify / improve "Edit Comment" interaction with bugmail

Status: NEW

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: Extensions, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

One thing that's not entirely clear to me is how "Edit Comment" interacts with bugmail.

Is bugmail sent out right away, such that if someone post a comment, and then edits it a few seconds later, the bugmail sent out will not reflect the edit?

I assume comment edits do not trigger bugmail of their own?

Am I right to conclude, then, that if a comment is edited to add some important information not previously present, and someone only reads comments via bugmail, they will miss that important information?

If so, would it be possible to show a warning in the edit UI to that effect? Something like "Subscribers are not notified of comment edits; if adding new information, consider adding a new comment instead."

Another possible improvement might be to have a delay of, say, 60 seconds, before sending out the bugmail, so that any edits made immediately after posting (a common scenario) are reflected in the bugmail.

Comment 1

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Or sending a new bugmail for the edit would probably be fine too.

Comment 2

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

(In reply to Botond Ballo [:botond] from comment #0)

Is bugmail sent out right away, such that if someone post a comment, and then edits it a few seconds later, the bugmail sent out will not reflect the edit?

Will be sent right way. Any edit, even after a few sec, won’t be reflected AFAIK.

I assume comment edits do not trigger bugmail of their own?

Email notifications for edits was proposed in Bug 1510831 but eventually WONTFIXed. I believe many edits are typo fixes (we haven’t actually analyzed yet) and you probably don’t want to get notified for everything.

Am I right to conclude, then, that if a comment is edited to add some important information not previously present, and someone only reads comments via bugmail, they will miss that important information?

Yes, but as I mentioned in the bug noted above, you cannot reply to bugmail, and you’ll see the comment on the bug page with any edit at that time.

If so, would it be possible to show a warning in the edit UI to that effect? Something like “Subscribers are not notified of comment edits; if adding new information, consider adding a new comment instead.”

I don’t think this is necessary. GitHub also allows you to edit comments but such a warning isn’t placed.

Another possible improvement might be to have a delay of, say, 60 seconds, before sending out the bugmail, so that any edits made immediately after posting (a common scenario) are reflected in the bugmail.

You can fix typos in 60 seconds, but it may take longer to add any missing important information. So I’m not sure if this delay is enough… But I’d like to see such a delay for another reason:

My personal UX & tech wishes

tl;dr: Comment edits and any other change to a bug should be submitted and reflected to the bug page right away.

• No more annoying mid-air collisions 🙌
• No more form submissions
• Each change will be sent via the Bugzilla API immediately in the background.
• Each change will be received via the WebSockets or Web Push API. We don’t have any web notification system now. (Bug 1281087)
• Unlike form submissions that allow you to change multiple fields at once, this modern Ajax-y architecture increases the number of client-server interactions. So email notifications should be sent not immediately but once per 60 sec-ish with multiple changes combined.
• In the future, once Bugzilla becomes a modern web app with a personal inbox, in-app notifications, etc. as I experimented with BzDeck, bugmail could be removed, disabled by default, or changed to some digest style.

Comment 3

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

FWIW just because github does things a particular way doesn't mean everybody should. By that argument we should just EOL bugzilla and move to github. With respect to emails about edits, I consider github's behavior deficient and not something we should emulate. Is it easy to get data on what portion of edits are typos (e.g. less than 10 chars changed) vs substantial edits?

Comment 4

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

I also consider GitHub’s behaviour deficient just because it allows to reply to email notifications, and the chance of you missing important info is higher, as I pointed out in Bug 1510831. That’s a big difference from Bugzilla. While GitHub is obviously better than Bugzilla in many aspects, it’s still sending a whole bunch of email notifications, and that’s not what I want to see. My UX inspiration is rather Slack. Anyway, many modern apps allow to edit your comments (one exception is Twitter) but probably the most of them don’t notify the changes via email.

I’ll ask Bugzilla admins to get some insights from people’s comment editing history.

Comment 5

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

Just chatted with Botond in person :-) Came up with solutions like this:

• Add a small notice to bugmail, like “Comments may be edited after posted. Read the latest comments in the bug”
• Add a “This is a minor edit” checkbox like MediaWiki and send bugmail if unchecked

Comment 6

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Comment edits and any other change to a bug should be submitted and reflected to the bug page right away.

Less mid-air collisions would of course be nice, but that could also be done by checking which properties actually changed and only warning if there is a real conflict (and not just a potential one), couldn't it?
Plus even with live edits you might still want some special UI that a bug's properties changed while you had its page open, because otherwise those changes might be too easy to overlook.

I'm not sure I'd be too happy about live edits on the other hand - setting up all the flags and other bits you want to change can sometimes take a while, and even more if you also want to write some accompanying explanatory comment, and I feel it would still be better to only explicitly submit the changes when I feel that I'm actually ready with everything. Plus sometimes you might start editing a bug, but while writing the comment or researching some accompanying info realise that my changes to the bug don't actually make sense. Right now I can simply hit cancel and start over (or completely abandon my changes), whereas with live edits it would already be too late.