[development] Voting on issues (was Re: How to post bug reportsandpatches)

[Daniel F. Kudwien]

Thought about this some more.

Allowing users to vote on issues is probably good for novice users, who do
not deal with many issues at the same time.  However, for the rest of us,
who work on plenty of issues, it would take a considerable amount of time to
constantly removing votes from closed issues and thinking about where to
place votes next.  Considering this, I would predict that this will be too
much overhead for me.

Furthermore, I would most probably like to see approx. 90% of all issues
resolved, which I follow-up on or (re-)roll patches for.

Long story short: I'd prefer a simple "flag" solution. Just collect flags
(and also re-use them for "subscribing"), count them, and done.  That way,
everyone could flag the issues of interest, without having aforementioned
overhead.  Just a simple flag corresponding to "+1, good issue, me too,
let's get this fixed".

This would also account for the previously mentioned edge-cases:

- Issues languishing in the queue for years are most probably flagged by
*many* users (such as 8 or daylight saving time).

- Same for killer features like DBTNG.

- Same for critical bugs in stable releases like
http://drupal.org/node/311626 or http://drupal.org/node/305653

Also, if users were allowed to place more than one vote on one issue and
each user gets a fixed contingent of votes, the contingent would have to be
per project IMO.  With flags, we would not need such complex logic to allow
a certain amount of votes per project.

Lastly, if we re-use those flags to extend the "My issues" list, we would
finally fix the "subscribing" issue-derailing issue.

Daniel