Kohsuke Kawaguchi's Blog

Announcing java.net issue police

One of the common problems of java.net project owners is the e-mails that people send to issues@yourproject.dev.java.net. This list is normally reserved for the automatic notifications from the issue tracker (thus it gets lower level of attention), but mistaken users often think this is the list to report any problems, and send in e-mails directly.

The "issue police" daemon monitors the issues list, and if it finds such an e-mail, it will politely remind the user that the issues list is for notifications only. It's very easy to use, too — just add issue_police@dev.java.net as a subcriber to your issues list.

(And while I have your attention, if you run java.net projects, you'll probably find my other projects like autoresponder, role manager, java.net tasks, and logger useful.)

Comments

• Credit: this project is insipred by Jesse Glick

  Posted by: kohsuke on March 06, 2008 at 10:23 AM

• role manager... you must be a genius. It's fantastic and what always amazes me about your products is how easily they approach the problem. And while reading the the policy file, I was thinking "Too bad I'll have to redo this for all the projects I own", when I see the redirector example at the end of the file. That's fantastic.

  I have to pay you a beer at JavaOne!

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on March 07, 2008 at 08:32 AM

• I take this chance to discuss about one thing that has been puzzling me for years. So far, I've manually applied the same policy described by Kohsuke for membership requests: Project Owner requests are kindly refused, Observers are automatically confirmed, while I ask an introduction for people wishing the (Content) Developer role.

  What amazes me is that I received answers only once out of ten cases :-O I've even tried to contact directly people to _account_@dev.java.net, but no way. Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong?

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on March 07, 2008 at 08:44 AM

• 
  I agree that on some projects people never respond to these e-mails. Judging from responses from some people, it appears that people often mistakenly think that they need a role to be able to access the code. So perhaps that's what's happening with your projects, too.
  

  Posted by: kohsuke on March 07, 2008 at 10:36 AM

• > I have to pay you a beer at JavaOne!
  He he, I'll count on it, then :-)

  Posted by: kohsuke on March 07, 2008 at 10:42 AM

• re: Fabrizio. We see the same behavior at GlassFish. Even worse. Sometimes the cynical in me thinks some people just want to be able to say "developer at OSS project" in their resume. Most likely it is confusion. - eduard/o

  Posted by: pelegri on March 13, 2008 at 08:49 AM

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