Bug nickname feature is hard to discover and use

IMO, although there are some bugs that have been given nicknames, I suspect it would be a win to remove this feature from the UI entirely as the simplification would be more of a benefit than the feature. The nicknames are still needed under the hood to support migrating bugs from other bug trackers though, which has turned out to be the primary use for this feature.

This issue has been made worse since the use of AJAX widgets for editing the description and title of a bug. Now you have to manually add /+edit after the URL of a bug report in order to set the nickname.

We have no plans to make nicknames more prominent. Like stub wrote way back, we should remove the access completely from the UI since it is only supported for bug migrations.

Cheers,
deryck

Deryck, is this simply because the feature is underutilized, and the resource usage doesn't justify the assumed benefit? Can you share some stats on what percentage of projects/people actually use(d) the feature?

Part of me thinks that would be a circular argument, since we can't expect many people to use a feature with an ambiguous description that's hardly visible anywhere, even if it has the potential to be very useful, like bug nicknames do..

This is really just a judgment among lp devs that the feature's usefulness doesn't warrant the development effort. There is no hard data for this fact, except that most bug trackers refer to bugs by number. However, I did do some poking in the data and currently less than 4% of our bugs have nicknames. If spot checking is to be believed, most of these are from bug imports.

Cheers,
deryck

More strongly, bug nicknames exist solely to facilitate imports.