William Tunstall-Pedoe

 William Tunstall-Pedoe

 William Tunstall-Pedoe

How to get random hilarious anagrams as your Bugzilla quip list

Bugzilla has a feature where you can get it to display a random "quip" or one-liner at the top of each list of bugs.

Follow the instructions below to add an exceptionally large selection of hilarious anagrams of your company name or product name as your list of Bugzilla quips!

(1) Download Anagram Genius and install it. The free trial version is sufficient unless you want to do a great deal of experimentation or particularly care about the precise quality of the anagrams (in which case download the full software).

(2) Start up Anagram Genius and enter your company name into the "text to anagram" box. The variants which work best are reasonably long with a good mix of common letters. Feel free to experiment by adding or removing appendages like "incorporated" or "limited" from the end.

(3) Select the "Business" and "Computer" custom dictionaries. Set the number of anagrams to keep to something appropriate (anything up to a million may work but a thousand or so is probably sufficient).

(4) To avoid embarrassment, possible sexual harassment lawsuits and dismissal from your job, switching off the Vulgar words option is highly recommended.

(5) If you want to do a good job, click the Word button and search for/promote the most relevant subwords for your business and then click Weed. If you want to be lazy, just click Weed

(6) From the Save menu, select "Save raw anagrams…" and save out the text file. (Alternatively, you can produce a much smaller list of better anagrams by meticulously weeding the best ones out and saving out the report.)

(7) Export the list of anagrams into the ‘quips’ table (in bugzilla’s database). The text goes into the "quip" field, approved should be set to 1 (which appears to be the default field value with 2.20.1). As you are using bugzilla I’m assuming you are sufficiently technically proficient to do this step without further guidance. (We managed using phpMyAdmin "insert data from textfile into table" without having to modify the file or even use the mysql command line.)

(8) Ensure that quips are set on in the bugzilla user preferences.

That’s it! Forever on, you will now see a random amusing anagram at the top of each bug list.