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New Feature
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Resolution: Unresolved
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Low
User story
As a plugin maintainer,
I want to be able to disable the comments section for my plugin repo entry.
As soon as the comments are disabled,
if a user goes to the plugin page in the plugin repo,
he does not see the comments section anymore.
Instead, he sees a clear note that comments are disabled, where he should turn to with any questions (Bug tracker, Forum thread, whatever) and that support requests on other channels are not handled.
Reasoning
You will know the cases when some user of the plugin just drops a comment with a problem into the comments section and expects to get answers. Within our plugins, we even have a large and eyecatching box which says that we don't give support in the comments section (see https://moodle.org/plugins/local_staticpage for an example). But people just don't care. And then they complain that they don't get an answer about their problem which they just dumped into the comments.
Implementation proposal
- Add a checkbox to https://moodle.org/plugins/edit.php?plugin=<PLUGINNAME> called "Disable comments section"
- Add a dropdown to the same page which has the options Bug tracker URL, External documentation URL, Website URL, Discussion URL. It defaults to Bug tracker URL.
- As soon as the checkbox is activated, the comments section is not shown anymore on the plugin page. Instead a note is shown which says something like that:
Comments are disabled on this page
Please note that the plugin maintainer does not provide any support for this plugin in the comments section on this page.
For bug reports and support requests, please read the available information on this page and behind the given "Useful links". If your question is not answered there, please turn to <Configured URL>.
Thanks for your cooperation.
How to deal with existing comments
Regarding existing comments which were given before the comments were disabled, there is the option to a) freeze but still show them b) hide them as well.
Personally, I would vote for option b).
With option a), we would also need a possibility to remove the existing support comments and only leave the cheering comments.