I believe it was a few years ago, possibly more, when someone (was it Josh Matthews? David Eaves) added a feature to Bugzilla that indicated when a person was “New to Bugzilla”. It was a visual cue next to their username and its purpose was to help others remember that not everyone in the Bugzilla soup is a veteran, accustomed to our jargon, customs, and best practices. This visual cue came in handy three weeks ago when I encouraged 20 new contributors to sign up for Bugzilla. 20 people who have only recently begun their journey towards becoming Mozilla contributors, and open source mavens. In setting them loose upon our bug tracker I’ve observed two things:

ONE: The “New to Bugzilla” flag does not stay up long enough. I’ll file a bug on this and look into how long it currently does stay up, and recommend that if possible we should have it stay up until the following criteria are met:
* The person has made at least 10 comments
* The person has put up at least one attachment
* The person has either reported, resolved, been assigned to, or verified at least one bug

TWO: This one is a little harder – it involves more social engineering. Sometimes people are might be immune to the “New to Bugzilla” cue or overlook it which has resulted in some cases there have been responses to bugs filed by my cohort of Ascenders where the commenter was neither helpful nor forwarding the issue raised. I’ve been fortunate to be in-person with the Ascend folks and can tell them that if this happens they should let me know, but I can’t fight everyone’s fights for them over the long haul. So instead we should build into the system a way to make sure that when someone who is not New to Bugzilla replies immediately after a “New to Bugzilla” user there is a reminder in the comment field – something along the lines of “You’re about to respond to someone who’s new around here so please remember to be helpful”. Off to file the bugs!