branch whiteboards should be editable only by their owners

The point of whiteboards is that anyone can edit them.

If you want to store important information about your branches, your best bet is to edit the description field.

Jonathan, I don't think its that simple. Why would a branch owner allow anyone to drop/replace all whiteboard content? ... even if some don't care, the whiteboard is displayed to anyone looking at the branch details on launchpad. Please reconsider your Won't Fix decision.

IMO, if you don't want to add fina grained access control to whiteboards, branch owners should at least be able to disable whiteboard completely.

I'm always happy to reconsider decisions :)

My questions are:
    - how are you using the whiteboard such that reliably controlling it becomes a pressing need?
    - why not use the description?

I would also like to know what the policy is for other whiteboards in Launchpad, but that's something I can chase up myself.

Personally, I think whiteboards should be removed (everywhere!), and in the places where we think conversations should be had, there should be comments, and if it's more permanent, it should be descriptions.

AFAIK, this bug was triggered because we had random users editing the whiteboard with content that didn't make much sense. I don't think we use whiteboards for something.

<jml> asac: so, IIUC, the issue was that the branch whiteboard was generating spam?
<asac> jml: more or less yes.
<asac> jml: problem is that whiteboard content is visible at a prominent place
<asac> jml: and for outsiders it doesn't really look like its content that they cannot trust. that would rather be a "Comments ..." section or something.

- We should restrict this for now, to reduce spam.
- Contact Any User deals with many of the use-cases that whiteboards deal with
- Whiteboard requiring owner privs to edit is redundant with a description requiring owner privs to edit.
- Ideally, we'd have a wikified field with versioning, or a thread based comment system

The branch whiteboards have been removed now.

The branch summary was also removed, but is coming back as an owner editable description field.