R.E.

I'd definitely second that – I cannot believe that this is an intended function of gamerule doFireTick false as Dinnerbone said. I feel that earlier commenters might have given the developers the wrong impression, and made them think that they were complaining about fire not spreading, which is NOT the problem.

This gamerule should, based on its description, prevent fire from spreading – but instead, it causes many, many more fires due to the lightning not properly taking doFireTick into account when it strikes. Even worse, when doFireTick is disabled due to its current non-functional behavior, these fires then spread, leading this command to be unusable in its current state.

Furthermore, looking at the sheer number of duplicate tickets created to report this single bug, I have to question the choices made by the Mojang bug reporter staff, specifically with regards to simply closing these massive number of duplicate entries instead of perhaps taking them as a sign that maybe this issue was not correctly resolved. A quick search for "doFireTick" results in a shameful number of entries simply being marked as duplicates and closed, complete with a snarky note indicating users should search before posting their bug reports – advice that the moderators should, perhaps, take themselves.

This is tremendously annoying. I like to have doFireTick false on our server to allow players to make better fireplaces, but I can't do this without having lightning causing hundreds of fires in inaccessible locations that need to be manually extinguished! If doFireTick is false, lightning shouldn't make fires at all.