When default application policies are applied to objects, they are currently copied directly. This allows you to create a policy like:

Default Edit Policy: epriestley

...but this is rarely a useful default policy because it's hard coded to one specific user. A parameterized default would more often be useful:

Default Edit Policy: Acting User

Under a parameterized policy like this, alincoln created a task, the effective policy would be "only alincoln".

I think this is the only useful parameterization among the builtin policies, although it should also ideally be possible to create a parameterized custom policy which uses "Acting User" in conjunction with other rules. This is blocked by T4100.

We can't implement T5135 until this happens, because the current default policy is effectively this parameterized policy ("only the acting user"), and there's no way to express that policy with a defaults control.

This may also interact with T5681. It is possible that applications may have meaningful policy parameters which are creation-time resolvable, although I can't really think of any offhand.

This might possibly interact with T6524, although it doesn't make a ton of sense to me to default a policy to the actor's IP address.

Original Problem

The reporting user wanted to configure Phabricator so that users can create tasks, but can not edit tasks created by other users.

This use case is unusual, but adjacent to other things we want to support and mostly within the realm of reasonableness.

Original Report

Under /applications/view/PhabricatorManiphestApplication/ there currently is only Can Edit Task Status which can be set to All Users or Administrators.

Neither choice is a good one. Setting it to Administrators means, that normal, non-administrator users cannot create new tasks (such as bug reports or feature requests). In our project installation we want normal, non-administrator to be able to create new tasks. Our only option at the moment is to set it to All Users. But this is also not really what we want. Having a user modify its own ticket is okay. But having arbitrary normal, non-administrator users being able to modify each and every task is a security issue.

A good policy for Can Edit Task Status would be Ticket Creator and Administrators.

Alternatively, other bug trackers such as trac allow normal, non-administrator users to create tickets, but not to modify any. Seems even better to me. Configuring as such is currently not possible with maniphest.

Talked about this yesterday with @epriestley on IRC. So if my report is unclear, he can hopefully clarify it.