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>3.8. Hints and Tips</H1
><P
>This section distills some Bugzilla tips and best practices
that have been developed.</P
><DIV
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><H2
CLASS="section"
><A
NAME="AEN363"
></A
>3.8.1. Autolinkification</H2
><P
>Bugzilla comments are plain text - so typing <U> will
produce less-than, U, greater-than rather than underlined text.
However, Bugzilla will automatically make hyperlinks out of certain
sorts of text in comments. For example, the text
"http://www.bugzilla.org" will be turned into a link:
<A
HREF="http://www.bugzilla.org"
TARGET="_top"
>http://www.bugzilla.org</A
>.
Other strings which get linkified in the obvious manner are:
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>bug 12345</TD
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>comment 7</TD
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><TD
>bug 23456, comment 53</TD
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><TD
>attachment 4321</TD
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><TD
>mailto:george@example.com</TD
></TR
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><TD
>george@example.com</TD
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><TD
>ftp://ftp.mozilla.org</TD
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><TD
>Most other sorts of URL</TD
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><P
></P
>
</P
><P
>A corollary here is that if you type a bug number in a comment,
you should put the word "bug" before it, so it gets autolinkified
for the convenience of others.
</P
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CLASS="section"
><A
NAME="quicksearch"
></A
>3.8.2. Quicksearch</H2
><P
>Quicksearch is a single-text-box query tool which uses
metacharacters to indicate what is to be searched. For example, typing
"<TT
CLASS="filename"
>foo|bar</TT
>"
into Quicksearch would search for "foo" or "bar" in the
summary and status whiteboard of a bug; adding
"<TT
CLASS="filename"
>:BazProduct</TT
>" would
search only in that product.
</P
><P
>You'll find the Quicksearch box on Bugzilla's
front page, along with a
<A
HREF="../../quicksearch.html"
TARGET="_top"
>Help</A
>
link which details how to use it.</P
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><H2
CLASS="section"
><A
NAME="commenting"
></A
>3.8.3. Comments</H2
><P
>If you are changing the fields on a bug, only comment if
either you have something pertinent to say, or Bugzilla requires it.
Otherwise, you may spam people unnecessarily with bug mail.
To take an example: a user can set up their account to filter out messages
where someone just adds themselves to the CC field of a bug
(which happens a lot.) If you come along, add yourself to the CC field,
and add a comment saying "Adding self to CC", then that person
gets a pointless piece of mail they would otherwise have avoided.
</P
><P
> Don't use sigs in comments. Signing your name ("Bill") is acceptable,
if you do it out of habit, but full mail/news-style
four line ASCII art creations are not.
</P
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CLASS="section"
><H2
CLASS="section"
><A
NAME="attachments"
></A
>3.8.4. Attachments</H2
><P
> Use attachments, rather than comments, for large chunks of ASCII data,
such as trace, debugging output files, or log files. That way, it doesn't
bloat the bug for everyone who wants to read it, and cause people to
receive fat, useless mails.
</P
><P
>Trim screenshots. There's no need to show the whole screen if
you are pointing out a single-pixel problem.
</P
><P
>Don't attach simple test cases (e.g. one HTML file, one
CSS file and an image) as a ZIP file. Instead, upload them in
reverse order and edit the referring file so that they point to the
attached files. This way, the test case works immediately
out of the bug.
</P
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