Question

For example:

http://fogbugz.stackexchange.com/questions/1055/subscribe-another-user

This is a huge pain for me. Even if I assign a bug to someone, they have to know they have to subscribe (or I have to remember to subscribe) if I want to get updates, totally different than how BugZilla works and how many people think. I know you guys "want to reduce email noise", but please, can you pay attention to what a lot of customers want?

I have been using FogBugz for many years now, mostly with a single person company. But now that I have expanded to multiple developers, this always gets in my way.

Please, you will make more money if you don't try to impose your will on how other companies operate, have some flexibility. This has been an issue for years.

Answer 1

See this answer. But with a serious caveat.

This is another one of those instances where a reasoned design stance has turned into some sort of dogma. An occupational hazard of having a guru at the helm. People like clear answers and the courage it takes to give them. But clear answers have a way of becoming dogmatic and unreasoned over time. We don't maintain that our way is exactly the right way (anymore). It still comes back to design trade-offs, and you find yourself on the wrong side of one. You're not alone.

In the debate about required fields, we have made a trade-off that favors flexibility and openness over control. People who want required fields (or Bugzilla-style blocking) find themselves on the wrong side of our trade-offs, and have to figure out for themselves whether the advantages of FogBugz are worth giving up required fields, or if this is a true dealbreaker.

What I've come to call Notify functionality, though, occupies a different space. Let's call it possible-and-necessary-but-hard-to-do-well. It's the same space Case Event Editing used to occupy before one of our guys fixed it for 7.3. And the same space that true historical reporting used to occupy before FogBugz 8, now in limited beta. Seeing a pattern here?

The lack of Notify functionality has come to be a liability. The design trade-off we made--to err on the side of fewer emails--is limiting us more and more as the months slip by. Someone will take up this challenge. It's just a matter of when.

Update: The Notify feature has been implemented as a plugin to be released in an upcoming version of FogBugz.

Answer 2

Sometimes it's a matter of us preferring one way to do things, sometimes it's a matter of change (even for the better) doesn't come for free, and often it's a combination of both. We've tried to make FogBugz a lot more flexible via plugins and are continuing to update the available interfaces as we find shortcomings.

Certainly, subscribing other people to a case is possible via plugin. We haven't written it ourselves, and I'll be honest, it's not a high priority, but it's feasible for someone else to do so.

Answer 3

I've created a plugin which will allow any normal user to subscribe any other normal user to a case (or remove another users's subscription.)

In the future I plan on adding an option to the user preferences which will disallow another user from removing/adding a subscription to a case on someone else's behalf. Probably won't be for a while though.

I've been using this plugin for quite some time and have no known bugs/issues... if you do find anything wrong with the plugin, please email me at jim@jimdio.net (I take no responsibility if this plugin does not work or has any unintended side effects.)

The plugin is available in the plugin gallery!