[paol]

Ha! I was subscribed to this bug for most of those 25 years. Note that Firefox didn't exist at the time, this was filed against Netscape Navigator.

Don't remember why I was subscribed to the bug, must have commented on it or something. Got the occasional email notification about it over the years, always got a chuckle out of it. Then a couple of days ago, lo and behold, it was fixed!

[hypeatei]

I find it amazing that your subscription to that bug thread survived all those years. Wow!

[bombcar]

I have a few bugs that are almost ready to go off to college, and I get an email about once a year from various machinations involving them.

[2Gkashmiri]

And then you have stale bot on GitHub closing issues for no activity in like 3 months -_-

[Zuiii]

That bot is disgusting. I spent a lot of time and effort to write detailed bug reports only to have this stupid bot spit in my face close them (and yes, some of the bugs are still there till this day).

I've learned not to bother submitting bug reports unless I can guarantee that my time will not be wasted. If I find a bug in a project that doesn t guarantee this, I either fix it privately for myself or switch to another project.

Closing issues automatically. What a demented idea.

[sesm]

That's because most Github repos are not for collaborative development, but rather for marketing and customer support.

[aendruk]

Closing is one thing—at least you can still use the issue as a communal gathering point to make slow progress. The casual locking on the other hand is mystifying.

And so often there’s the added gaslighting of a project that provides some rationale for closing but then inexplicably locks too as if that’s the same.

[bombcar]

Closing is great - it’s an honest assessment that “we’re not going to work on it.”

It still turns up in search and you can comment on it (some even reopen automatically if you do).

Locking automatically is just the worst - we don’t care, we won’t care, and you’ll never get us to care.

[5e92cb50239222b]

I like these kinds of statements, they let you know right off the bat that your time is better spent elsewhere. People who see this as normal will screw you over sooner or later in other ways, e.g. by changing licenses or needless rewriting over and over and over again. At least that's been my experience.

[robin_reala]

Me too: I remember, when I was first toying with the idea of building websites as a career, being fascinated by the idea of having a web site where the background was transparent or translucent down to the desktop behind. I always figured you should be able to do something like html { background: transparent; } and have it just work.

It’s worth pointing out that this bug fix doesn’t actually do that. For a start, it’s a preference that can be toggled on by the user or an extension, rather than a default thing that websites can choose. Probably for the best: it’d certainly open up new avenues for clickjacking.

[donio]

> this was filed against Netscape Navigator

Mozilla Suite rather than Netscape Navigator. This is from 2000 which was well into the Mozilla era and I don't think that Netscape bugs made it into Bugzilla anyway.

[robin_reala]

Netscape 6 and 7 were reskinned Mozilla Suite. It was Netscape 4 that was (mostly?) pre-Bugzilla.

[culi]

Wow so this bug is older than Firefox itself

[oniony]

Netscape, Mozilla, Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox.

[playingalong]

Next should be Jira's ticket about versions across projects.

[b112]

Wonder if others had the same local names, Nutscape and Internet Exploder.