RFE: Improvements to wording of bugzilla account-creation pages?

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com>]

I believe we need some wording improvements relating to the disablement
of bugzilla account creation.

If I go to:
  https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/createaccount.cgi
I see a page reading:


BEGIN QUOTE:
To create a GCC Bugzilla account, all you need to do is to enter a
legitimate email address. You will receive an email at this address to
confirm the creation of your account. You will not be able to log in
until you receive the email. If it doesn't arrive within a reasonable
amount of time, you may contact the maintainer of this GCC Bugzilla
installation at overseers@gcc.gnu.org.

[snip]
END QUOTE


Sadly, due to spamming, most of the above is either untrue or
misleading. Can we change the wording on that page to something like:

BEGIN SUGGESTION
Sadly, due to heavy spamming, there is no automated way to create a GCC
Bugzilla account.

To create a GCC Bugzilla account, you can email overseers@gcc.gnu.org.
Alternatively, if you use IRC, you can ask on #gcc on the OFTC network
(irc.oftc.net).

[snip]

END SUGGESTION



If users *do* fill in the form, they get to a page which reads:

BEGIN QUOTE:
<RED>User account creation has been restricted. Contact your
administrator or the maintainer (overseers@gcc.gnu.org) for information
about creating an account.</RED> Please press Back and try again.
END QUOTE

(this was attempted using my personal gmail.com account, rather than my
regular redhat.com account)

This wording could also be improved.

"User account creation" doesn't make it clear that it's a site-wide
thing, the "user" in question could well be interpreted as relating to
the individual user (and I hear anecdotal reports on IRC that people are
trying this and thinking "oh, is it because I'm on gmail" or whatnot).

Also the "Please press Back and try again." is plain wrong; if someone
retries, it isn't going to make it work, as I understand things.

I'm guessing that the red text is from a BZ parameter, in which case it
may be easier to modify.

Suggested rewording of red text:
"Sadly, due to spamming, we've had to disable automated account
creation.

To create a GCC Bugzilla account, you can email overseers@gcc.gnu.org.
Alternatively, if you use IRC, you can ask on #gcc on the OFTC network
(irc.oftc.net)."

(we could have s/creation/creation for that domain/ maybe, if that's the
case?).

(Alternatively, a captcha, or somesuch, but clearly that's a lot of
extra work.

Or make the original field on the createaccount.cgi hidden to humans,
and add a human-visible field with a different key, so the spammers are
POSTing to the wrong field, so that their queries are easily
distinguishable from benign activity - we reject POSTs where the
invisible field is nonblank - though, again, that's nontrivial coding
(and I don't know Perl)).

Hope this is constructive, but I think we're making it unreasonably
difficult to file bug reports, and thus likely missing out on the more
casual contributions to GCC etc.

Dave