I was searching for an issue on gitlab.com just now, and noticed I couldn’t search any project’s issue tracker without signing in: a banner says “You must sign in to search for specific terms.” To reproduce, simply open https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/ in a private browsing session and try to search for any term. I’m shocked by the user hostility. There’s zero chance I’m going to move my open source projects to gitlab.com if users can’t even search the issue tracker without creating a GitLab account and signing in. Truly baffling decision. I was so shocked I dug deeper and tracked down the offending code and MRs that introduced them (appreciate the ability to do this, I’ll give them that). This is controlled by a feature flag :disable_anonymous_search and manifests as
in rendered HTML. Relevant MRs from 10 months ago: – https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/70223 – https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/70249 I don’t see any justification given, but the former MR says “Related to #340716” which doesn’t link to anywhere, and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/340716 is 404, so maybe something internal? The feature flag also doesn’t appear to be default-on for self-hosted instances. Aside: Interesting that despite hearing about GitLab on HN all the time (including how people are moving from GitHub to GitLab in droves), it took me ten months to even notice this. Just about every open source project relevant to me is still on GitHub, or in certain cases, self-hosted. Really makes me wonder if there’s a certain amount of astroturfing going on.
Story Published at: July 27, 2022 at 05:23PM
Story Published at: July 27, 2022 at 05:23PM