Tell HN: Gitlab.com doesn't allow issue search without signing in

48 points

4 years ago

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 <div class="js-issues-list" data-is-anonymous-search-disabled="true" ...> 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.

Edit: Removed a potentially controversial aside since I don’t want to steer the conversation that way.

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20 comments