Proposition: Restrict dupe-ing ability to bugsquad members

[Vassilis Pandis]

Hi,


A few days ago a bug triager (who's not on the bugsquad or QA team) silently marked a number of
ubiquity bugs as duplicates. The bugs were wrongly marked, and no explanation was given by the
triager as to why they were marked, possible workarounds (etc. i.e. no comment whatsoever). I
unmarked these bug reports and asked him on a bug report on what criteria the bugs were duped, but
haven't received a reply yet.

I am thus proposing that the ability to mark as duplicates is restricted to only members of the
bugsquad. Tracking down bugs that were wrongly marked as duplicates is time consuming and causes
an uneccessary amount of bugmail. As a reporter, I would feel offended if my bug report was marked
as a dupe without even receiving an explanation. The rationale behind this is that marking a bug
as a duplicate is not something that a total newbie should be doing (can they read backtraces?
have they taken the time to read the relevant wiki pages ?).

The only case as far as I can tell, in which such a restriction is not desirable is when the same
reporter accidentally submits the bug report twice. This is quite a marginal case though and can
be treated easily.

Finally, this incident only makes me worry: What will be done in the case of a malicious "attack"
on Malone? If suddenly somebody (for whatever reason) decided to mark 100 bugs as duplicates,
confirm/reject another 100, we would evidently have a problem. (I know this has been discussed in
the past, but after this I feel obliged to raise it again)


Any ideas?

Pandis


PS: I fixed all ubiquity bugs to which I was subscribed but I currently I don't have time to go
through all the recently changed ubiquity bugs. 

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