comment validation to prevent '+1 subscribe' comments

I don't think this is worth the effort.

We more or less tried the same for Dreditor "after the fact" in #660960: Hide '+1 Subscribe' comments, but that never saw the light of day due to false-positives.

Users will very quickly understand that they don't have to comment to follow an issue anymore.

I'm 100% confident on that, since most are used to the follow approach via many other web apps.

Yeah, when hunmonk asked me about this in IRC I said I was generally -1, too. If the new UI isn't obvious, I give up. This validation doesn't seem worth the effort (both to try to get working in the short run, and to maintain for future d.o upgrades), and social pressure will certainly be very effective in applying the clue bat where necessary.

I'm not yet going to "won't fix" but that's my current vote unless I hear compelling new arguments in favor.

That said, thanks for caring and writing it up so we have a real place to debate it. ;)

Cheers,
-Derek

I agree in wontfixing this too (due to the great possibility of false positives and all). Instead, we can be "slapping" people across the head till they learn to stop the "+1/subscribe" commenting each time they do. For those that still didn't realize the existence of the follow/unfollow button, I guess we could perhaps duplicate it near the issue settings section/fieldset or the "Save" & "Preview" buttons.

No matter what, still... WE HAVE KILLED THE +1 COMMENTS!!! YEEHAW!!!

I agree, no filtering, for the same reason I won't fixed the issue in sun's comment. BUT... it might be good to have some extra notification of the change for the first few weeks after the change - eg. a highlighted message above the comment form. If that's too hard, then yeah, just won't fix this. I'm more than happy to git a few verbal slaps for sub comments after this is rolled out.

I'd say just do this client-side. Just look for common strings like "+1", "subscribe", "subscribing", etc. If that's the only text in the textarea, then show a little notification with Javascript that says something to the effect of "Did you know that we fixed subscriptions on Drupal.org? If you want to subscribe to this issue, scroll to the top of this page and click the big green follow button." and don't do anything other than that. It'll remove the need to worry about false positives, and it'll let people know that they don't need to subscribe with a comment anymore (though, I'm not sure how ANYONE could miss both that green button and the inevitable front-page announcement)

It's good to have had this discussion, but, by now, it looks like everyone agrees that it would be a waste of time and effort.

If there is no client or server-side validation, can we at least have an official go ahead to delete +1 subscribe comments in new-ish issues (where people should be using the follow button instead)?

I doubt anyone is going to go around deleting old comments just off the bat. It's not a very systematic approach. Something better might be to implement a "redundant" comment flag, so that old comments can be put in a queue for mods to look at. See #406076-11: need more anti spam measures

No, I mean, if I go open a new issue after this feature is released and get 100 +1 subscribe comments on it, can I delete those comments and leave a comment saying "+1 comments deleted. If you want to subscribe, use the follow button."

As soon as the follow flag is integrated, I guess that deleting "+1 subscribe" comments would be possible.

We'd have to test whether the author of the comment is still subscribed to (following) the issue after deleting the comment.

If that is the case, then I see no problem with deleting useless comments. That would be very beneficial and helpful for the people that actually want to work on an issue.

That said, as a last resort, instead of deleting, we can also unpublish. However, most of the people who do most of the issue review and discussion work unfortunately see all comments, regardless of publishing status; so unpublishing wouldn't hide the comments for them. But then again, we could definitely and easily do something about unpublished comments in Dreditor. (!)

@sun sounds like one way or another the hiding of unpublished comments should be added to dreditor. *winks*