Most followed issues on Drupal.org - February 2012

February 15, 2012
5 minute read

The Drupal project uses the project module to track bugs and features on drupal.org. For a long time if you wanted to pay attention to an issue you had to comment on it resulting in the infamous "subscribe" comment. In late 2011 a feature was created to allow people to subscribe to an issue without commenting on it. The world rejoiced (see this article for history and details).

This gives us an interesting bit of metadata that is not exposed in the user interface anywhere: issues with a lot of "follows" are likely to be important to the Drupal project. I got curious and did a little query magic and found the following issues have the most followers.

The top 10 most followed issues:

Count of followers	Issue
297	Field tokens
216	State of the multigroup module
194	db_rewrite_sql causing issues with DISTINCT
179	HTTP error 0
166	Port twitter to Drupal 7
154	Combo field - group different fields into one
147	'HTTP error 0 occurred' on image upload
141	PHP 5.3 issue - Attempt to modify property of non-object (Date module)
139	Port Open Atrium to Drupal 7
137	[meta] Unofficial Drupal 8 Framework initiative

But if we look at those many of them have many subscriptions because they have many comments. The first one, for example, has 520 comments and when the follow system was rolled out the previous commenters had their follow flag set to on.

So, I re-ran the query to remove any flags from people who had commented on the issue.

The top 10 issues based on followers who didn't comment:

Count of followers	Issue
75	Port Open Atrium to Drupal 7
70	[meta] Proposal for features needed for a full 2.0 release of the Media module
64	File-based configuration API
54	[meta] Theme/render system problems
51	Start a Code Cleanup Initative
49	Remove chx from MAINTAINERS.txt
46	[meta] Unofficial Drupal 8 Framework initiative
46	Add unified context system to core
44	Update to use Google maps API V3
43	Add views support for providing a list of entities or bundles (views filtering, relationships, etc)

One interesting thing here is that this list makes the value of the follow button completely obvious. One example has just 22 emotion filled comments and 49 "follows." That would have been a 2-to-1 noise-to-signal ratio without the follow button. What a great improvement!

Looking at that list there are some which are old and have a lot of follows simply because they are old. So, I added a filter for flags created in the last 30 days.

The top 10 issues based on followers in the last 30 days who didn't comment:

Count of followers	Issue
32	Duplicate entry of themes primary key in systems table of Drupal 6.24 (using Drush or Ægir)
30	Port Open Atrium to Drupal 7
27	[meta] Theme/render system problems
25	File-based configuration API
24	Drupal core upgrade from 7.10 to 7.12 causes menu block to fail
20	Update to 7.x-1.4 adds duplicate language prefixes, causing a redirection loop
18	Follow menu_link_get_preferred active trail handling for custom menus
18	_field_info_collate_fields() memory usage
15	Fix jQuery 1.7 for Drupal 7
15	add a generic entity processor

A lot of the issues are the same across all three tables. For example, people really want Open Atrium on Drupal 7 and that makes some sense (I wonder how many are paid Open Atrium support customers, helping directly to move the project forward).

These issues really are some of the most important and interesting issues in Drupal right now. They represent a mix of different root-causes and priorities, but 'solving' these will be key to the project.

If you'd like to see these numbers in a dynamic table I've added the queries I used to this issue: provide lists of most followed issues.