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,
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