Wednesday 23 September 2015

New bug status for ColdFusion bugs: DELETED/NEVERHAPPENED

G'day:
This is just a repro of something Aaron said on the bugbase, which reveals a rather interesting act of weirdness on the part of the Adobe ColdFusion Team. And you know how I love those.


I spotted this today on the Adobe bug tracker (look quick, before it gets redacted!):

[ANeff] Bug for: Adobe is deleting thousands of tickets from their public bug tracker

Adobe is deleting thousands of tickets from their public bug tracker. 2,824 ColdFusion tickets have been deleted between June 9, 2015 and September 22, 2015.

Steps to Reproduce:
1) Try to view any of these ColdFusion tickets which were fixed in CF11 Update 3: 3041747, 3043855
2) Try to view any of these ColdFusion tickets which were fixed in CF11 Update 5: 3037144, 3039708, 3041684, 3041790, 3043111, 3043375, 3043657, 3044064, 3114274, 3226380, 3369472, 3520983, 3673298, 3842326
3) View attached 20150609_CFTicketsTotal.jpg and see total ColdFusion ticket count was 5,140 on June 9, 2015
4) View attached 20150922_CFTicketsTotal.jpg and see total ColdFusion ticket count was 2,316 on September 22, 2015
5) View attached 20150609_CFTicketsFiled.jpg and see -my- total ColdFusion ticket count was 455 on June 9, 2015
6) View attached 20150922_CFTicketsFiled.jpg and see -my- total ColdFusion ticket count was 328 on September 22, 2015

Action Items:
1) Restore the tickets deleted between June 9, 2015 and now.
2) Delete no more tickets.



My emphasis.

I can confirm a lot of the bugs I have raised have been deleted. I don't track the numbers, but I can see they're way down. Also looking at one of my older blog articles ("Most popular unhandled ColdFusion bugs"), all the ones I checked from that list - and a reminder: those are the most popular unhandled bugs: so ones we clearly care about - have been deleted.

So what's going on here then? What on earth would possess Adobe to delete this stuff? Even if a ticket has been fixed, it's all valuable historical information... not everyone will be patched-up or running the current version, and the ColdFusion Team has a nasty habit of closing tickets when they can't be arsed doing anything about it, so a lot of historical bugs will still actually be potentially impacting their clients. All this sort of action is achieving is increasing potential work for their clients as they troubleshoot issues which might actually already have been identified and discussed (if not fixed).

What's more, the content of those tickets is - on the whole - the community's work, not Adobe's. I put effort into tickets I raise so they're googleable and reproduceable and are intended to stay there so as to save people time if they run across the same issue. So please don't delete my bloody work, Adobe. Or Aaron's work. Or Ray's or anyone else's.

And, um... please explain.

Update:

And, indeed, they have explained. Apparently it was not their team that did it, it was another team. The team who looks after the Adobe bug tracker were a bit too zealous in making older versions of ColdFusion unselectable when raising new tickets, and in the process made all the tickets for those versions "invisible". Okey dokey then. I do have to wonder why no-one on the ColdFusion Team noticed this change, or checked the results of it, or... seemed to care, prior to Aaron bringing it up..?

--
Adam