Anonymize GitLab User/Group Names on Status Detail Pages
Problem to solve
Incident response teams need to be able to share incident updates and status changes anonymously. When a responder launches a new status page for an issue, the entire description is published publicly. User and group names in issue descriptions need to be anonymized.
Proposal
Parse the incident title, description and their comments for user names and remove them from the JSON. Replace them with "Incident Responder" for a first pass.
When #209114 is completed, we can update "Incident Responder" with "user one" or similar so it's easier for external users to make sense of the incident comments and timelines.
Maybe in scope
- Synchronizing description anonymization with comment anonymization. Since team can choose to make comments private or public it is unlikely they will need to have a comment both be public and include user names that need to be obfuscated.
- If the work is trivial to provide the same mechanism to remove user names from the description and the content of comments then it seems worth doing the work as part of this iteration.
Out of scope
- Providing an anonymous mapping such as "user one" or "anonymous ostrich". See #209114
Permissions and Security
Documentation
Availability & Testing
Links / references
One thought though - do we need to make a follow-up issue to anonymize all user names in the incident descriptions? I notice infra team members are sometimes @ mentioned in the incident timelines. Right now, these mentions will show up, as we are just printing the issue descriptions without edit. I seem to remember @AnthonySandoval mentioning that anonymity was important when we discussed comments, so perhaps we should also be making user names in the incident descriptions anonymous as well?