YJL

I swear I have seen this “new” voting for a while, perhaps a month? And I’ve used it once, but Bitbucket just announced No more +1s — Bitbucket Issues now has voting.

It’s a great feature and certainly is needed, although I never thought of it on Bitbucket, probably because I don’t get many chances of using Bitbucket often, even though I’d love to.

Comments with “+1” are just simply annoying, especially when you have email notification set up. On any popular issue, you get a lot of useless comments like “+1” or rephrased-like comments on exactly same point. By “a lot,” I do mean a lot, a ton load of those.

Google Code Hosting even has a switch to deal with it if I recall correctly. These comments—not limited to “+1” only, they are not only spawning on issue trackers, but also forums, blog comments, anywhere with a comment box. I even wrote a post about my predicament for having comments enabled on this blog and I have a deletion policy on “thank you” comments. Yes, I delete that kind of blog comments.

Bitbucket issue voting is like staring on Google Code issue tracker, but better. Voting and watching are basically different systems, although voting would also be watching automatically, but you can cancel the watching if you want. Much better than Google Code’s, and way better than GitHub’s which doesn’t have this functionality.

Speaking of GitHub, I have written a feature request for “Number of watchers” to GitHub on 2013-01-28 as shown below.

I’d like to request Number of watchers of an issue.

The reason behind this request is it can encourage people to watchonly instead of commenting like “+1,” which is virtually valueless.

A good example is

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/8832

Which is currently the most commented issue. For people who have watched, they would’ve received many “+1” notifications and those basically can be sent to trash folder in their email client directly.

If the number of watchers is exposed, then there is a bigger chance people would learn to watch only.

It can also be used as sorting field, so people can know what issues are more important. Number of comment shows the importance, however, it counts each comment. Number of watchers only counts one GitHub once, which I believe it shows how important an issue clearer. I also believe for project that big, some people would just watch issues they are interested or have problem with, so number of watchers can reveal something we can’t at this moment.

That’s all why I think the number should be exposed.

Sincerely yours,

Yu-Jie Lin

Although this isn’t the same as voting, at least not with the same naming, but it’s a way to reduce no value comments. Here is GitHub’s response:

Thanks for your feedback! We’re always working to improve GitHub and we consider every suggestion we receive. I’ve added your idea about showing the number of watchers of an issue to the Feature Request List™ for the team to see.

If you have any other questions or suggestions, please let us know!

Cheers,

[name removed]

GitHub has something nicked “Feature Request List™” and it’s only internally accessible. Believe me, I have tried to hint GitHub or have directly asked GitHub to make GitHub site issues public, but just no luck. They seem not want to deal with annoying users, but prefer receiving same requests via emails. Nonetheless, GitHub has added “Most commented” sorting as I have requested and even an additional “Least commented” sorting.

Although Bitbucket now has this voting feature. I still hope they will add Labels, because I’d like to have “patch-welcome” on some issues, or having some OS-related labels like on Google Code issue tracker. Bitbucket does have “Component” and “Milestone,” but oftentimes, you just need some customization for your funky issue management.

Nevertheless, would this voting feature help reduce “+1?” Maybe. Maybe not. There is always some guy intentionally tries to get attention by making others’ life uneasy.