Proposal: remove the restriction on normal Bugzilla users being able to change the Severity field

[Nate Graham]

Hello everyone!

Some time ago, we instituted a restriction preventing normal Bugzilla users from being able to change the Severity field of Bugzilla tickets. The reason for this change was to stop users with excessive ego from marking their own tickets and tickets they care deeply about as having the "critical" Severity level.

However due to technical limitations in Bugzilla, we were unable to prevent users from setting the Severity to "critical" (or anything else) at the moment they create the bug report, which introduced the odd situation of a user who accidentally sets the Severity level incorrectly by mistake being unable to correct the mistake!

This policy also prevents volunteer bug triagers from correcting the Severity level of miscategorized tickets (e.g. marking crashes as "crash" and feature requests as "wishlist") without being specifically granted permission by sysadmins, Christoph Feck, or me. This is a barrier to participation in bug triage.

My sense is that this policy created more problems than it solved, and it did not even succeed in solving the original problem anyway. I would like to propose letting unprivileged Bugzilla users change the Severity field once again. The priority field would still be restricted to privileged users.

Thoughts?

Nate