Launchpad itself

"Invalid" unnecessarily confrontational

Asked by Jeff Young

Many Launchpad projects rely on their community for bug reports. Sometimes these bug reports aren't valid, but setting them to "Invalid" is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. You're very likely to get into an argument with your community member.

"Not a Bug" or "As Designed" would be much less confrontational.

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Colin Watson (cjwatson) said : 		#1

Note that requests for changes to the Launchpad software should generally be bugs rather than questions.

That said, I think this is probably entrenched the way it is now and difficult to change; for example, changing it to "As Designed" would render the status quite wrong for many bug tasks (for example where it's used for something like "bug needs to be filed on some other site instead where Launchpad can't track it", among other things), and how would it differ from "Won't Fix"? Splitting the status would be tough in other ways (UX overload, and some statuses have special workflow/permissions associated with them).

My experience has been that the reaction of the person at the other end of a closed bug depends much more on the tone of the message used to close the bug than on the bug status name: a helpful and friendly message tends to get a matching response regardless of the status name, and likewise a brusque message is often met with a hostile response.

So I'm not definitively saying we'll never do this, but it's likely to be quite a bit more work than a simple rename, and it's not clear that it'd be worth it. At the moment you have three options for "closed with no action", which are Invalid, Won't Fix, and Opinion, and we're probably getting into diminishing returns for drawing increasingly fine distinctions there.

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