New Newsgroups

We’ve finally finished all the paperwork, and are glad to be able to say that Giganews have kindly offered to host the new Mozilla newsgroups. Giganews are one of the largest Usenet providers, with over 10% of all Usenet posts coming through their servers, and we’re very happy to have them taking care of this for us.

I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve done this, but I sincerely hope this is the last. Please give your final comments on the list of new groups. Before commenting, please read the questions and replies in the previous three discussions. Please note that in the new world we will have much greater control of groups, including creation and removal, so do not be concerned that the list needs to accommodate future as well as current requirements.

36 thoughts on “New Newsgroups

  1. So… in the last discussion I mentioned the need for an Nvu newsgroup. Your response was that this would be covered in the dev.tech.composer group, however, that group no longer exists. As such, I’d like to bring back my original comment requesting that their either be an Nvu group (which I understand could not be introduced until Nvu is a m.o project) or a composer group (which was removed in the last round).

  2. I am surprised the crypto.checkins newsgroup is there with the comment “required by US export regs”. They do need/want a way of getting the information, but in my opinion it would be enough to point them to CVS and Bonsai. But anyway, not a big deal even if we do have that checkins ng.

  3. YAY!!!

    This has been needed for so long! Thank-you Giganews, thank-you Gerv! May happier and more productive newsgroups come our way. OK, a few questions:

    mozilla.dev.platform will contain XULRunner discussions, is that correct? Could you possibly add that comment to your text file to make it clearer please?

    Will discussion on Thebes, Cairo, Glitz, Pango and gtk etc. take place in mozilla.dev.tech.gfx? Could you add a summarising comment there too please?

    Will a page (similar to the text file) be made for mozilla.org or DevMo regarding these newsgroups? It would be good if we could minimise cross-posting/posting in the wrong area.

    And will any old news be ported over, or can we start from scratch (I like this idea)?

    Again, thanks for all the hard and persistant work over the years to get this going :)

  4. w00t. I presume that Giganews has decided to do this before 2007? :)

    I think I have only one comment on the list: mozilla.test is also a replacement for netscape.mozilla.test. ;)

    Also, how much more of an official Mozilla project is Camino than Nvu, since it gets a newsgroup but Nvu doesn’t…

    Also also, m.wishlist will cover wishes for everything? Should messages sent to it just be cross-posted (with a followup-to!) to the specific app’s group?

  5. Is the Users branch for end-user support? If so, wouldn’t it be better to rename it Support, e.g. mozilla.support.firefox?

    Sorry if this has been discussed before.

  6. David, it has been discussed before, although I don’t think “support” was suggested. I also feel that “users” may not be clear enough, and suggested “userhelp”, “techsupport”, or just “help”. It was temporarily changed to “userhelp”, but then Gerv decided that “users” is more clear than “userhelp.”
    Between “users” and “support”, I prefer “support”. It coincides with the terminology on the website too.

  7. Peng: Nvu isn’t a mozilla.org project. At least, that’s the reason I was given when requesting it during the last round of revisions. If/When it’s hosted on m.o, it’ll be given a newsgroup (but it might be under a different name then ?).

    I do, however, think there needs to be a “composer” newgroups if nothing else, but I’ve already said that. ;)

  8. My post above is the one that starts “YAY!!!” Posted by: at August 26, 2005 09:14 PM
    For some reason my name disappeared…

    I have another question though:

    Will you be taking into account the following bugs?

    Bug 33494
    Bug 62228(Opened: 2000-12-07!) and all of it’s dependencies.
    Bug 114856
    Bug 145126
    Bug 173864
    Bug 216488

    By take into account I mean consider them for the new setup, resolve them or add a status update.

  9. How about separate wishlist groups for each of the major products. ie:
    mozilla.users.firefox.wishlist
    mozilla.users.thunderbird.wishlist

    This should be where end users make their requests for products. As opposed to a generic mozilla.wishlist group, this way people that are interested in only one product can discuss something that they want added to it. If it all went into mozilla.wishlist, I would think that there would be a lot of noise from people making requests for each of the products.

    I, also, think including nvu as a product is a nice idea.

  10. On another note, taking a look at the Giganews website, which pricing plan will Mozilla be on?

    “Giganews have kindly offered to host the new Mozilla newsgroups.” Is this for free? I’m guessing so.

  11. Will these groups be “real” Usenet groups, ie. available for public worldwide distribution (eg by peering etc.)?
    Will the mail2news gateway be intact, that currently wires the Mozilla groups to respective mailing lists? (Not that I used these lists…)

  12. Whether Mofo is paying for it or not, I don’t know; but the pricing plans on the GN top-page are for individual subscribers. News.mozilla.org isn’t supposed to contain all usenet groups, anyway.

  13. FFS, because of comment reviewing, the comment I submitted right after Samuel Sidler’s comment from 11:26 PM still isn’t here. Entering an URL shouldn’t make it consider you a different person. Hmph. Anyway, if this goes through instantly, this is what I said:

    Eep, quick replies. :)

    You know, this should have also been directly posted in some of the newsgroups, since they’re what it concerns…

    Samuel:

    All right. Camino is at http://www.caminobrowser.org/, but it was at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/ and its files are still at http://ftp.mozilla.org/, though the website looks to be on DreamHost…

    And it has a relationship with Mozilla, while Nvu doesn’t and is completely hosted elsewhere?

    (Yes, I know it says not to resubmit comments, but the conversation here is going pretty quickly and I’m impatient.)

  14. Will free public access still be available?
    I am currently reading / posting via the public news.mozilla.org server (since my ISP doesn’t seem to have a NNTP server available…); will that server stay around, or would some new server take its place? (Okay, so I don’t really care about that either way… All I really care about is that it will not be totally removed.)

  15. Mook, the new newsgroups are meant to replace those currently on news.mozilla.org. The server name will remain the same, and access will remain free.

  16. When will this happen?

    Will the Mozilla newsgroups propagate to other NNTP servers? Or will they be strictly local to Giganews?

  17. DERoss, I don’t know if there’s a planned date, but obviously that may depend on the feedback regarding the proposed newsgroup list. How about the traditional Mozilla answer: “when it’s ready.” :-)

    As far as usenet propagation, yes, it will propagate.

  18. ssidler: Here’s the logic: each app has a group; Seamonkey is an app; it has a group. Composer is part of Seamonkey, so it doesn’t have its own group, just as Seamonkey Browser doesn’t have its own group. Nvu is not a mozilla.org project (yet), so doesn’t have one. The editor technology behind all of this does have one, mozilla.dev.tech.editor.

    So… can you have Composer discussions in .seamonkey and editor tech discussions in .editor?

    Heikki: we’ve had that group for years. If you think we don’t need it any more, great. Let’s ditch it.

    Person with no name: comments added to my local copy. We will be starting over, although the old groups will still be accessible.

    mmcmonster: IMO, the current wishlist newsgroup doesn’t get enough traffic to justify splitting it up further.

    Everyone: access will be exactly the same as now, free from news.mozilla.org. I think the groups will be available for peering, but I’m not sure. There will still be a mailing list gateway.

  19. David, Chris: I’d be open to changing “users” to “support”. It’s nicer than other suggestions I’ve heard. “.feedback” might have to move up a level, though. What do other people think?

  20. Now that I think of it, the name of the user support hierarchy is all about making it as recognizable as possible for the novice user. “users” is more obvious than “support”; but IMO, “help” is best. Devs usually know to recognize “dev” in the newsgroup name. Users don’t.

  21. I’m confused, can people reply to the messages in m.announce to discuss the announcements? Maybe there could be a mozilla.announce.discuss that announcements would be cross-posted to?

  22. Chris, I’m surprised how you can say “users” is more obvious than “support”. If I was a Real User and was looking for help with an application, I would probably not even notice mozilla.users.* because of the name. If I saw mozilla.support.* on the other hand, I’d immediately recognize it as the place to get help with the application. mozilla.help.* would work too, but support sounds better and is what is used on http://www.mozilla.org.

    I’d be happy with either of “support” or “help”, but “users” is just confusing. That sounds more like a community of users just hanging out on usenet. :)

  23. I took the time to look at the terminology used by other software vendors, almost all of them use ‘support’; so I change my mind back to ‘support’, rather than ‘help’. (not very consistent, am I. :-( )

  24. Chris, David: “support” it is, then.

    Peng: announcements should be cross-posted to a relevant group, with a Followup-To header, for discussion.

    funTomas: let’s have SVG discussion in “.general” for now; if it gets overwhelming, we can split it off.

  25. I suggest:

    mozilla.support.* -> mozilla.answers.*

    (I believe some non end-users will go to such a list, but I think that’s fine.)

    mozilla.evangelism -> mozilla.brokensites

  26. I don’t like using “dev” as a hierarchy name. It’d be better to abbreviate it less severely, either as “develop” or at least “devel”. You want to make it as clear as possible that these are groups for development discussions, and people who aren’t developers might not understand where “dev” comes from.

    I’m also not crazy about “tech”. In USENET, “tech” usually means a group for discussing technical details (e.g. rec.audio.tech, comp.sys.amiga.tech). Seeing “.dev.tech.” struck me as redundant at first–what development isn’t technical?–until I realized that “tech” stood for “technologies”.