launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Bryce Harrington <bryce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 09:21:00AM -0600, Deryck Hodge wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 9:49 PM, Huw Wilkins <huw.wilkins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > Let's talk about the bug start page for projects. I'm talking about pages
> > like this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad
> >
> > At the moment we display the top 10 hottest bugs. There is no pagination or
> > ordering controls. What do we gain by showing this listing?
> > What if instead of limiting the bugs we show a normal bug list?
> >
> > The question is, do we retain bug heat as the default order or is there
> > something better?
> 
> I agree with others who think displaying bugs by heat in this way is
> misleading.  I also think our use and display of heat across Launchpad
> should be evaluated at some point, but that's outside the scope of our
> current work.

Netflix has a nifty approach where each time you visit the main page it
selects a different criteria for the movies it shows you[*].  Since it's
different each time, you take a quick look to see what bubbled up.

This is sort of similar to the way I actually look for bugs in
Launchpad, for packages I maintain.  One day I'll look for "bugs with
patches", another day "bugs set Incomplete with recent comments",
another would be "Newest bugs added that are tagged 'precise'."

I use a similar approach for searching for bugs as a user, in packages I
don't maintain.  For example, I'll look for "Bugs filed a while ago but
still actively getting comments", or "Bugs recently closed as fixed", or
"Bugs with the most dupes/me-toos".

Aside from the other problems with Heat, if the list you see is always
just the bugs with highest Heat, it's boring.  It's always going to be
either the same list of bug reports, or the same general type (high
profile bugs that garner lots of user activity).  An approach like
Netflix, where you cycle through several different filters, might make
the page more intriguing and could expose a much wider variety of
interesting bug reports to people.

Bryce