Reducing Spam

The Bugzilla Guide
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# 6.1. Reducing Spam

Those who use Bugzilla frequently are probably used to notification spam
- unwanted or unnecessary notifications. A number of proposals have
been put forward to attempt to reduce this.
1. Reduce CC Spam
Some of you probably know me as that guy who CCs on heaps and heaps of
bugs. Just as you get a lot of CC changes from me, so do I get a lot
from others. Why should CC changes send out email notifications?
It's not necessarily the best idea to just remove the CC spam, there are
other issues too, like the difficulty of adding to large CC fields.
For these reasons and more, an RFE for a per user "BCC" facility exists
that people could use to silently and privately track bugs, in a similar
way to voting today, but applying to an unlimited number of bugs. See
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7345".
2. Bulk Changes
You know the drill - a large milestone change, a component movement,
whatever, and lots of notifications are generated. If there's enough
maybe you'll just go delete, delete, delete, whoops, there goes another
notification that wasn't from the bulk change you missed.
Shouldn't bulk changes send out one notification? A proposal for this
is at "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26943".
3. Configurable Notification Criteria
It would be good if you could choose what you want to receive. There
are two parts to this.
(a) Choose a selection of bugs you're interested in. This would be
similar to CC except you let the set be computed from selection criteria
rather than limited to the bugs your name is on. There is currently a
limited version of this in the bugzilla preferences, ie "all qualifying
bugs"/"all qualifying bugs except the ones I change"/"only those bugs
which I am listed on the cc line".
(b) Choose what changes will trigger a notification for the bugs you are
watching. With this, you could choose whether you want to receive cc,
dependency and keyword changes, for example.
Both of these proposals live at
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14137".
Note that they also live at
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17464", and the change
has been checked in. This is fixed with Bugzilla 2.12 and is no longer
an issue. Woo-Hoo!

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