Newsgroup Tweaks

Having stepped back and surveyed the landscape, we are considering making a few more tweaks to the newsgroup hierarchy, by merging some groups.

As a matter of principle, we think that both developers and users of a technology (e.g. XUL) should share a group. This sort of mixing is how users become advanced users and then developers. So we won’t be having separate hierarchies for “developing” and “using” the Mozilla platform. (This doesn’t extend to end-user support; we have and will continue to have separate groups, mozilla.support.*, for that.)

Here are our suggestions:

Group Move Discussion To Rationale
mozilla.dev.tech.style mozilla.dev.tech.css Better name improves discoverability
mozilla.dev.tech.widget mozilla.dev.platform Attempt to consolidate platform-related discussion
mozilla.dev.tech.xpinstall mozilla.dev.platform Attempt to consolidate platform-related discussion
mozilla.dev.tech.xslt mozilla.dev.tech.xml XSLT group is too specific; fractures community

Comments, anyone? Of course we will be posting our suggestions in the relevant groups as well.

4 thoughts on “Newsgroup Tweaks

  1. Regarding mozilla.dev.tech.xslt, it might be too specific but on the other hand most discussions have been fairly focussed which I always saw as a plus.

  2. I have been following the mozilla project for a long time and have never figured out the newsgroups, so when i saw this post I decided to check them out. i checked out the mozilla website and the developer section (http://www.mozilla.org/developer/) refers to mailing lists and newsgroups led me to this page http://www.mozilla.org/community/developer-forums.html. I had to stop there because I had something else to do at the time. Later I decided to check them out again so i went to mail.mozilla.org figuring that would take me to the mailing lists and newsgroups, but that took me to an entirely different page. It was then why I remembered why I never figured this out.
    Maybe mail.mozilla.org should point to http://www.mozilla.org/community/developer-forums.html or both of those pages should be consolidated.
    Speaking of consolidation, when I was searching through the website it also didn’t make sense that developer.mozilla.org and http://www.mozilla.org/developer were two different pages and neither is an exact replacement for the other, for example the newsgroups aren’t linked to from developer.mozilla.org. I don’t know if the goal of developer.mozilla.org is to replace http://www.mozilla.org/developer, but it would make sense if they were consolidated.
    I don’t know if this is the correct or best place for these suggestions but I appreciate all the hard work going into this project and something like the newsgroups can really benefit from being more discoverable.
    If these suggestions should be sent to someone else, please let me know so that I can contact them. Thanks

  3. @ok: First i think there are historical reasons, but also practical ones. With a newsreader you just have to fire up the newsreader and look if there are any unread postings, if not you’re done. Also these newsgroups are mirrored via mailing lists so people can get the discussions “pushed to their PC” (or rather get those disussions via mail to their mail account) instead of needing to check the forum. Also with a newsreader you have the same UI for every newsgroup (not only mozilla.*), many powerful features included. With a forum there is a good possiblity you’ll find different forum versions, different standard themes, etc. Also you have to register for a forum normally, on Usenet you can normally post without one (assuming you have a Usenet server somewhere). And there are various Usenet archives out there, if a forum is gone, the content is normally lost, too (of course you have to admit how many public archives would be left if Google Groups goes down? not sure). Anyway, stopping here, i guess there are enough websites out there which discuss advantages and disadvantages of newsgroups :).

  4. Ah and of course 1998 Mozilla was still the main browser and had a newsreader included ;) (these days of course you can still use Mozilla/SeaMonkey or Thunderbird).