Goodbye Hendrix

5 years ago, when Bugzilla was overwhelmed with badly-written enhancement requests, I created Hendrix – a web-to-news gateway to help us try and do something with feedback, but in a “default no reply” mode rather than the “default to creating work for QA” mode of an open Bugzilla bug. It took feedback for Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, SeaMonkey and even MDC and the Firefox eBay Companion. The original plan was to run statistical analysis on it, but recently fellows like the excellent David McRitchie have been replying to individual messages. (Kudos to him for his hard work.)

But today, if we look at message counts, it seems that Firefox traffic is the only significant source of new Hendrix message – between 50 and 150 a day. And in the last year, Aakash has been developing his excellent Input tool to take feedback for Firefox.

So in a couple of weeks, we plan to decommission Hendrix and point the URLs http://hendrix.mozilla.org/ and http://feedback.mozilla.org/ at http://input.mozilla.org/.

If your project is using our Hendrix installation to collect feedback (although I don’t think anyone else really is) then you will need to find a new mechanism. Thunderbird are using GetSatisfaction and there seems to be a general Mozilla area too. Or you could just switch to using a maling list.

4 thoughts on “Goodbye Hendrix

  1. No doubt Hendrix served its purpose in its time, but Input is a much better feedback mechanism. The statement on the Hendrix forms of “do not expect a response to feedback submitted here”, while truthful and realistic, gives the impression that Hendrix is a virtual black hole, where nobody actually looks at what is submitted. Input also provides no expectation of a personal response, but still gives the impression that the comments are being looked at and having some effect, at least in the aggregate.

    Input is only built-in for Firefox 4, so perhaps some effort could be put into publicizing it for users of older versions.

  2. What regards SeaMonkey, it seems that the “Report Broken Website” menuitem has disappeared at some point — at least, I can’t find it back in my current 2.1b2pre nightly. There are the mozilla.support.seamonkey newsgroup / Google group / mailing list and even the #seamonkey IRC channel but I’d say the former is where mutual-help posts are most likely to be found. So, bye-bye Hendrix. :-)

  3. I’ll miss Hendrix. For one thing, it had character. For another, we could COUNT on it being a black hole for trolls.

    You may find that Input is a mirror for trolls and spammers. They’ll love it because they get to see themselves in print. The only practical difference I can see is they will now get instant gratification.

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