September hackathon: Suggestions

[denise]

August's usability hackathon went awesomely! 42 bugs keyworded why-usability had some action, and 22 of them were resolved, which gives us a huge usability boost. Point bounties will be sent out as soon as I can con someone into doing it for me get a chance to put together the transfers.

September's hackathon will be for bugs keyworded from-suggestions. The points bounty will be:

10 points for effort-minor
50 points for effort-medium
100 points for effort-major

There are currently 336 open bugs keyworded from-suggestions, and 274 of them are unassigned. I'd love it if we could get those numbers down by at least 10% -- which would be 303 open, 247 unassigned -- or even more. There's been a number of new suggestions added to Bugzilla in the past few weeks, so give the bug lists a wander through and see if anything really strikes you!

Mass user-creation script

[sophie]

I've just put a mass user-creation script on the wiki. It allows you to create any number of users and have them be auto-validated. It will also randomly create watch/trust edges between the created users, and if you specify it, they will all join any given community. This makes it extremely useful when you have a bug that requires a large number of users to test, such as bug 2215: member list page: "jump to account" does not jump to username, which requires more than 100 users in a single community.

(I actually already had this script created some time ago, but hadn't released it publicly. However, when I saw kjwcode manually creating 100 users in order to test the patch on the aforementioned bug, I added the community-joining ability and offered the script to him, and realised I should probably release it for all to use!)

There are a few things the script doesn't do yet. For example, while it can make all the users join a community, it won't make any of them subscribe to it. If anybody wants more features added, let me know!

And, in the interests of code preservation (in case the wiki ever disappears for some reason - not that it should), I'm reproducing the code as it is now inside a cut. Bear in mind that it's possible that the version on the wiki may be more up-to-date if it's been some time since this post was made, so you should probably check on the wiki first!

( Source code follows! )