Bugzilla Etiquette
It is our intention that Bugzilla remain a useful tool for reporting and commenting on bugs, feature requests, and tasks for the Mozilla community. No single contributor's work outweighs the importance of civility and professionalism in the Mozilla community.
In order to keep Bugzilla a useful, inclusive place we have guidelines which, by using this site, you agree to follow. In addition, your participation on this site is also subject to the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines.
Violations of Bugzilla Etiquette or the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines are grounds for curtailing your privileges on this site, or suspending your account altogether.
Guidelines
Commenting
- No abusing people. Constant and intense critique is one of the reasons we build great products. It's harder to fall into group-think if there is always a healthy amount of dissent. We want to encourage vibrant debate inside of the Mozilla community, we want you to disagree with us, and we want you to effectively argue your case. However, we require that in the process, you criticize things, not people. Examples of things include: interfaces, algorithms, and schedules. Examples of people include: developers, designers, and users. Attacking or encouraging attacks on a person may result in you being banned from Bugzilla.
- No obligation. "Open Source" is not the same as "the developers must do my bidding." Everyone here wants to help, but no one else has any obligation to fix the bugs you want fixed. Therefore, you should not act as if you expect someone to fix a bug by a particular date or release. Aggressive or repeated demands will not be received well and will almost certainly diminish the impact of and interest in your suggestions.
- No spam. Posting comment spam will lead to the suspension of your account.
- No pointless comments. Limit comments on a bug to information which will help with resolving it. Unless requested, additional "I see this too" or "It works for me" comments are unnecessary. Constructive conversations unrelated to the topic of the bug should go in the appropriate discussion forum.
- No private email. Do not send comments on bugs by private email to users; no one else can read them if you do that, and they'll be missed and/or ignored. If an attachment is too big for Bugzilla, add a comment giving the file size and contents and ask what to do.
Changing Fields
- No messing with other people's bugs. Unless you are the bug assignee, or have some say over the use of their time, never change the Priority or Target Milestone fields. If in doubt, do not change the fields of bugs you do not own — add a comment instead, suggesting the change.
- No whining about decisions. If another project contributor has marked a bug as INVALID, then it is invalid. Filing another duplicate of it does not change this. Unless you have further evidence to support reopening a bug, do not post a comment arguing that a bug resolved as INVALID or WONTFIX should be reopened.
Responding to Violations
If you find a Bugzilla user violating the Bugzilla Etiquette or the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines in comments on bugs, please tag the comments in question so that an administrator can review them.
If a comment is abusive or threatening use the tag abuse. An admin will receive a notification shortly and be able to follow up. Bugs with comments marked, 'offtopic', 'spam', and 'advocacy' will also be reviewed.
If you think a comment may violate our policies, but your are not sure how to mark it, tag the comment admin and a moderator will review it.
If a bug's short-description, whiteboard tags, attachments, or user-created content other than comments that violate the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines or Bugzilla Etiquette, please describe the issue in a comment and tag that comment admin.
If you cannot tag comments (which requires
editbugs privileges,)
or if you need to contact a Bugzilla community administrator urgently:
To report incidents follow the How to Report Violations of the Community Participation Guidelines.
Using Matrix, you can contact a on-duty staff member in the bugzilla.mozilla.org channel on chat.mozilla.org.