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[cross-project-issues-dev] Are restrictions on Bugzilla worse than spam?

TL;DR: Bugzilla restrictions block new contributors - that's worse than spam.

Hi all,

A few weeks ago, because of a spam attack, access to bugzilla and ability to report bugs and comment on bugs for new members was restricted. New members now have to ask webmasters to be whilelisted and allowed to interact with the community.

I've got some colleague who just registered and tried to contribute and totally failed at it. The message about asking webmasters for whilelist wasn't visible enough apparently so they didn't realize it was necessary and just ended upĀ  with an account which seem unusable to them. So I had to forward messages in their name: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=506244#c19
Moreover, in that case, we're speaking about someone working on week-ends and is ready to contribute on week-ends, and I don't expect webmasters to promptly react to whilelisting request on week-ends. So even if the user would have sent a mail, it could have requested days to be processed.
If I had not been there to assist my colleague in contributing, he'd just had given up. And I'm pretty sure that several other people have given up contributing since the introduction of this "ask for permission" rule.

So IMO, the current state is by far worse than having spam. It makes the community more difficult to join for new subscribers and appear more closed than it is. A lot of effort were done in the past to "reduce barriers" from users to contributors, and this Bugzilla thing goes to the opposite direction.
Can we please have spam and new contributors again? And then consider approaches that have worked for other tools to avoid spam? I don't get why bugs.eclipse.org would be the only service for which reCaptcha wouldn't work...

Cheers,

--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer for Red Hat Developers
My blog - My Tweets

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