I've been debating saying something about this too - I think it happened when INFRA added some text to direct users to use the mailing list or IRC if they really have a support question instead of a bug (INFRA-16507).
The most basic solution is a simple re-ordering of the form, which in JIRA is really easy to do. We could put the environment field near the bottom and if someone is paying attention to the form and wants to fill it in, fine, but the rest of us can get at the most commonly used/needed fields quicker. As I was writing that I thought I'd refresh my memory of where screen editing is done in JIRA, and it looks like those of us with committer status have access to edit that form. So we can solve this quickly, and probably we can do it on our own without asking INFRA. If we come to consensus on either burying or removing the field, I'd be happy to be the one that makes the change. On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 7:24 AM David Smiley <david.w.smi...@gmail.com> wrote: > Many of us have accidentally added a long-form description of our JIRA > issues into the Environment field of JIRA instead of the Description. I > think we can agree this is pretty annoying. It seems to have been > happening more lately with a change to JIRA that for whatever reason has > made it more visually tempting to start typing there. I want to arrange > for some sort of fix with infra. I'm willing to work with them to explore > what can be done. But what should we propose infra do exactly? I'd like > to get a sense of that here with our community first. > > IMO, I don't think a dedicated Environment input field is useful when > someone could just as easily type anything pertinent into the description > field of a bug report. Less input fields means a simpler JIRA UI -- a good > thing IMO. But since it's been used in the past, it may be impossible to > actually remove it while keeping the text on old issues. Nonetheless I'm > ambivalent if it were to be outright removed and others here want this > since I think it's of such low value that data loss wouldn't bother me. > > Can it be retained as a purely read-only on display but otherwise can't > edit? I'd like that. > > Perhaps the path of least change and thus "safest" path is for it to be > removed from the "Create Issue" screen, yet retain it on other screens for > those that are fans of adding/editing it? > > ~ David > -- > Lucene/Solr Search Committer, Consultant, Developer, Author, Speaker > LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/davidwsmiley | Book: > http://www.solrenterprisesearchserver.com >
