Launchpad itself

"Most frequently reported" list not really useful when reporting a bug

Bug #84333 reported by Matthew Paul Thomas
6
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Fix Released
Undecided
Gavin Panella

Bug Description

When reporting a bug using the normal process, two lists are presented: the bug reports most similar to the summary you've entered, and the canonical reports for the bugs reported most often.

In my experience, the first list is often relevant, but the second list never is. And the presence of both lists makes the form invisible without scrolling. I suggest removing the second list.

Similarly, Sarah Hobbs says: "When searching for a bug, why do i care about the most reported bugs? They've got nothing to do with what i'm filing. I want to file my bug. That's all."

Tags: lp-bugs
Revision history for this message
Christian Reis (kiko) wrote :

Well, the reason we present that is that those bugs are the ones with
the most likelihood of being duplicates. But I agree that if those are
on-topic that it's most likely that they will show up in the similar-bug
listing anyway, right?

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

I understand that the original rationale was that the most frequently reported bugs would be the most likely to be the same as yours. But in practice it doesn't seem to work out that way -- or at least, much less often than the similar-reports list.

Besides removing the list, there are other ways it could be improved.
1. Reduce its length.
2. Consider only bugs that were reported in the past month.
3. Merge the two lists such that bugs with many duplicates automatically get ranked higher. Where d is the number of duplicates a bug report has, multiply that report's keyword-based relevance by ln(d + 2) to get the final weight.

Revision history for this message
Björn Tillenius (bjornt) wrote :

This list was moved to the first page, before doing the search.

Changed in malone:
assignee: nobody → allenap
status: New → Fix Released
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