There are a few problems I currently see with quips: (a) There is no duplicate removal, which can lead to easy abuse by some people. (b) Blanks lines are not removed. (c) I also think old quips should fall off the end, probably keeping only the last 100. I'm not sure if this currently occurs.

And of course, HTML tags are allowed when they shouldn't be.

The best solution is escaping them and displaying them rather than stripping them. Also we need to make sure there is a limit on the size of each quip to prevent abuse.

Probably true, but it's very sad. There have been some very nice HTML-based ones in the past.

Whatever you do with HTML, I suggest it should be advertising to the quipper when entering. I guess you could allow some HTML. You could: Prevent <BLINK>, <SCRIPT>, any unknown tags etc. <IMG> and <OBJECT> only to trusted sites, eg mozilla.org, to prevent porn. Allow <B>, <EM>, <FONT> within limits etc.

tara@tequilarista.org is the new owner of Bugzilla and Bonsai. (For details, see my posting in netscape.public.mozilla.webtools, news://news.mozilla.org/38F5D90D.F40E8C1A%40geocast.com .)

Blank lines are removed now (see bug # 1105). I can't bring myself to care about (a) as I've never heard of this being a problem, and I'm not sure why having a lot of quips (c) is bad. I'll have to look to see if there's a performace problem or something with having a super long list....

I consider (a) a problem because people can be encouraged to abuse the system to make their quip more likely to appear. You can see this occurs on mozilla.org if you look at the quip file. The quips at the top are OK (they've probably been fixed), but at the bottom there is plenty of abuse. I'm not sure about how this would be done though, at least using a text file which it looks like is being used. Inserting a line into a sorted file could well be an expensive operation assuming the current operation is a file append. An alternative is to keep most of the file sorted and add new lines at the bottom unsorted, periodically sorting the whole thing. Dupe checking would then be a binary search on the file possibly followed by a linear scan of the unsorted options. This entails a periodic sorting operation though, which implies locking the quip file for a while. (c) depends on the opinion of the person running Bugzilla. Some might want to keep quips fresh, while some might want to keep a large number.

So here's my take. The quips are this fun little thing that are eye candy only and have no functional value whatsover. I spent some time reviewing the mozilla.org quips list, and with the exception of about 5 really lame people who don't seem to understand the patheticness of putting in their quip 2^N times, there still aren't that many dupes. Given that I have a bazillion other bugs, and I'd rather not do this the old terry way (by never closing out bugs I don't plan on fixing), I'd like close this out since the part of this bug that I think was an actual problem (blank lines) has been taken care of. IMHO the dupes, length of file, number of quips, whatever, can be handled manually, or have a cron job deleting the file once a month, or some such. Giving the reporter a couple of days to scream at me and tell me how insensitive I'm being before resolving...

What about the problem of allowing html tags in quips?

Filed bug 41906 (disallow HTML quips) and bug 41972 (Pref to turn quips off).

Well, I *like* being able to do HTML quips. Like Terry says, there's been some cool ones. I'll look into adding as preferences disallowing HTML or disabling quips altogether, tracked by the new bugs.

In search of accurate queries.... (sorry for the spam)

VERIFIED, given that this morphed into a not-bug. Gerv

Moving closed bugs to Bugzilla product