Re: Reporting GCC bugs

[Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist dot net>]

On Tue, 2012-10-09 at 18:40 +0200, Torbjorn Granlund wrote:
> The GMP lists also receive spam attempts, a handful per day.  I deal
> with it manually, and with whitelists for known non-spammers.  The
> disadvantage is that it takes perhaps a minute of the moderators' time
> each day, and that people see delays in reaching the lists.

A mailing list is not the same as a bug tracker.  Many mailing lists out
there require subscription before posting to reduce spam.  Most GNU
mailing lists, including I believe gcc-help, do NOT require subscription
before posting.  We have a very nice system for handling spam to our
mailing lists and the GNU developers are quite willing to deal with the
remaining moderation duties.

On the other hand having extraneous bugs filed by spammers and having
spam comments added to existing bugs in Bugzilla is a far larger PITA to
handle than moderating a mailing list.  Bugzilla has no facility for
"moderating" bug comments or new bugs so that they can be rejected
before being accepted if they're deemed to be spam.  Instead the cleanup
has to come afterwards, and Bugzilla (like most bug trackers) does not
have great facilities for deleting bug reports and comments once created
(after all normally you wouldn't want to do this).

Requiring an account for bug reports alleviates this problem.  It also
helps with quality since it ensures we can reach you if we need more
information, and that you are notified of activity on the bug and can
respond.


Cheers!