BZ Quips

[Theo Van Dinter <fe...@apache.org>]

So this came up today on #spamassassin which led to #apache which led to the
asf members channel which led to a private discussion with me and the guy in
question (who doesn't want to bring the issue up here...)

The issue is that public discussion in a work environment, someone went to
Bugzilla and did a bug listing, and the following quip came up on the page:

BREAK THROUGH WALLS WITH YOUR C***

(*'s added for this post)


and so the issue was: is it appropriate to have that on an "official"
(for lack of a better term) website.  There was a concern that maybe
the SA PMC or ASF Board should/would have a problem with that.

So I wanted to bring it up for him and see what the general thoughts were
about this.

There seems to be two options really if people consider this a worthy issue:

1) remove questionable content from the quips and limit the addition cgi
2) disable quips altogether and avoid having to censor/police the list


Personally, I think that if someone is looking at a site talking about spam,
it shouldn't be too surprising to run into phrases and such from spam, even
ones that could be considered offensive.  On the flip side, I can see the
concern:

1) seeing that kind of statement in all caps could be disturbing
2) it may not be appropriate for work environments
3) users aren't able to enable/disable quips for their own displays as
   far as I can tell
4) there's no warning that quips may have "questionable content", since there
   are spam subjects in there, and it's freely open for people to add in new
   quips via the website.

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Re: BZ Quips

[Duncan Findlay <du...@debian.org>]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 05:55:43PM -0400, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> and so the issue was: is it appropriate to have that on an "official"
> (for lack of a better term) website.  There was a concern that maybe
> the SA PMC or ASF Board should/would have a problem with that.
> 
> So I wanted to bring it up for him and see what the general thoughts were
> about this.
> 
> There seems to be two options really if people consider this a worthy issue:
> 
> 1) remove questionable content from the quips and limit the addition cgi
> 2) disable quips altogether and avoid having to censor/police the list

Personally, I feel the BZ quips are stupid (at best), and I would not
be the least bit upset if they were removed. That's certainly a lot
easier than #1 above.

-- 
Duncan Findlay

Re: BZ Quips

[Sidney Markowitz <si...@sidney.com>]

Theo Van Dinter wrote, On 31/8/06 9:55 AM:
> There seems to be two options really if people consider this a worthy issue:
> 
> 1) remove questionable content from the quips and limit the addition cgi
> 2) disable quips altogether and avoid having to censor/police the list

I agree, and I do consider it a worthy issue. I had not even noticed the quips
before now, but I can imagine a work environment with a PHB looking over ones
shoulder, or a home environment with a kid doing the same thing. People will
realize that something about spam may contain offensive material quoted from
the spam, but that is different from the quip on every query results page.

My main problem with this, especially now that it has been pointed out in this
public forum, is that anyone with an axe to grind against SpamAssassin can go
into Bugzilla and add very offensive quips.

By "limit the addition cgi" do you mean only allow certain people to add
quips? Provide some sort of hold for moderation to the add process?

I think those could work, especially the moderation one if it is possible to
add to the cgi. Actually, there isn't that much need to have lots of quips
added all the time, so a list that only committers can modify would work fine.

I would not object to turning off quips completely, but I see no need to do
that if only committers can edit the list.

  Sidney Markowitz
  http://www.sidney.com

Re: BZ Quips

[Theo Van Dinter <fe...@apache.org>]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 05:55:43PM -0400, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> There seems to be two options really if people consider this a worthy issue:
> 1) remove questionable content from the quips and limit the addition cgi
> 2) disable quips altogether and avoid having to censor/police the list

Ok, from looking at the responses, no one seems to have a strong attachment to
the quips, so I disabled them for now.  :)    If someone wants to go through
and edit the list, we can switch back to frozen or something.

Justin:
> By the way, I'd forgotten about this -- any chance we can get the
> comment-by-email thing working again at some stage?

Hrm, no idea.  The issues machine already has a mail server running, so it
probably wouldn't be hard to configure it for dealing with BZ mail.  The main
issue is getting the ok from someone to go messing around on brutus.  I'm not
sure for what else it's receiving mails.

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 You feel cheap after using it." - From User Friendly, 07/26/1999

Re: BZ Quips

[Theo Van Dinter <fe...@apache.org>]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 05:55:43PM -0400, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> 1) remove questionable content from the quips and limit the addition cgi
> 2) disable quips altogether and avoid having to censor/police the list

BTW, I prodded around at BZ a little bit and it looks like the supported list
of quip options are:

enablequips:	Controls the appearance of quips at the top of buglists.
    * on - Bugzilla will display a quip, and lets users add to the list.
    * approved - quips can be entered, but need be approved before shown
    * frozen - Bugzilla will display a quip but not permit new additions.
    * off - Bugzilla will not display quips.

I'm not sure what allows people to approve quips -- seems to be admin
mode.  There's also not an easy way to edit/remove/etc quips directly.
There's a CGI that can do all that, but there don't appear to be forms
to access it.

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