A few folks were confused and dismayed to get an email today from bugzilla.redhat.com like:

“Some or all of your votes have been removed from bug NNNNN.
You had X votes on this bug, but X have been removed.
You have no more votes remaining on this bug.
Reason:
The rules for voting on this product has changed; you had
too many total votes, so all votes have been removed.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=NNNNN”

First, some background:

Bugzilla has “votes” on bugs. It allows each user to spend from their pool of votes and assign them to bugs that they like. I guess the idea is that highly voted bugs would show up as somehow more “important” and get more resources. We looked at generating a report on this to garner more resources for “important” bugs, but found that votes failed at this task for several reasons: They were hard to query, you could not tell how many people had voted, only total vote number, the vast majority of people didn’t see the voting interface so never voted, votes were never reported to maintainers in any way aside from the raw web interface, and others.

Additionally, some few people who did see the voting interface spent time and energy voting on bugs and asking others to do so, when in the end that did no measurable good aside from wasting their time. For these reasons, I asked the redhat.bugzilla.com folks to disable voting in the Fedora product.

Sadly, I was unaware that it would send emails to everyone who voted telling them (in a very negative sounding way) that their votes no longer counted. I’m sorry for any problems or negative energy this caused, I was just trying to save time and energy.

Additionally, I did hear of a valid use case for votes after the fact (but likely not enough for me to want to re-enable them): You can vote on bugs you care about, and use the voting interface to see progress on them (no need to CC yourself to a bug or spam it, you can silently see a group of bugs simply by voting on them).

So, I think this change was still for the best moving forward, and I would urge everyone who voted on a bug to go look at it and see what additional information could be added to it to move it to a resolution instead. FESCo has been looking at a way to see ‘very active’ bugs for a while now, please see: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-engineering-services/ticket/24 if you have ideas or would like to help out.