One of the complaints I hear about bugzilla is that it looks to complex. Some even say they like the Debian bug tracker's web interface better (probably because the debbugs web interface doesn't actually let you do anything). When an ordinary user goes to a bug page, it has many entries and list boxes for fields they are not allowed to change. By changing these fields to straight text, the bug info page would look a lot simpler, and it would be more obvious about what they can and can't do. I think this would make the show_bug pages a lot less daunting to casual users. This would also hide some of bugzilla's complexity when a bug reporter is looking at existing bugs when being walked through the submission process by bugzilla helper.

Hmm. I like this idea, except: a) if you're not logged in, everything should still shown because you may be able to change it later, once you do log in. b) If you're the reporter, you can (currently) change almost everything anyway, so this wouldn't end up hiding much in that case. ISTR seeing a similar RFE somewhere, though - is this a dupe?

making all options available when not logged in shouldn't be too much of a problem, and fits in with the way the rest of bugzilla works. I don't mind telling people to log in to get a simpler interface :) I think this would be a win for bug reporters: When they go through the bugzilla helper, it asks them to search for similar bugs. Any matches it turns up will belong to other people. It would be nice if they can judge whether their problem is the same one without being overwhelmed by the interface. If they are not the owner of that bug, I guess the only options open to them would be to add themselves to the CC list, create an attachment or add a comment, which is a big improvement. This could quite possibly be a duplicate (I did search a bit, but maybe for the wrong keywords). Getting rid of needless UI complexity is a good thing, and should help get rid of bugzilla's image of being difficult to use.

Looks like it might be a dup of bug 95923. I missed this one when searching for reports like this one.

Yep, its a dupe. Although this one is more clear - maybe copy some of the comments from here to that? *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 95923 ***