Closed Bug 323820 Opened 19 years ago Closed 18 years ago

Propagate new newsgroups to usenet.

Categories

(mozilla.org :: Miscellaneous, task)

task
Not set
major

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: jlayoj3121968, Assigned: hecker)

References

()

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051219 SeaMonkey/1.0b
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051219 SeaMonkey/1.0b

Well, lets get the ball rolling here. For many and sundry reasons I and others would like to see the new Mozilla newsgroups (or at least the announce & support groups, but preferably all of them) propagated to the rest of usenet.

My own reasons are flat-out convenience and to grow and maintain as large a support (& development) community as possible.

I invite others to post other reasons here as well.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
N/A
*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
This is Frank's call.  It was discussed in depth before we even started and the decision was made not to propagate.  The main reason, I believe, is because Usenet tends to be a wild place, and we didn't want to deal with the spam that comes with usenet-wide propagation (we get a lot of spam on netscape.public.mozilla.*, which is propagated).
Assignee: server-ops → hecker
Component: Server Operations → Miscellaneous
QA Contact: justin → justdave
Component: Miscellaneous → Server Operations
oops, sorry
Component: Server Operations → Miscellaneous
http://www.mozilla.org/community/giganews-migration.html

It is the way it is by conscious decision, see the FAQ above. Bugs are an extremely poor technology for hosting discussion, this should be hashed out in the newsgroups themselves.

From the FAQ "Based on feedback from the community, this may change at some point in the future, but deciding to allow propagation is an irreversible decision so we're starting out the "safe" way."
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 18 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID
The problem with relying on discussion in the groups is that the people affected negatively by this will be underrepresented in the groups, if at all.

In that light I request this bug be reopened.
I would prefer that for now we *not* propagate the Mozilla newsgroups to Usenet at large (particularly since we haven't even completed the transition yet :-) We have to balance the usefulness of having wider propagation vs. the usefulness of having (relatively) spam-free groups. IMO the newsgroups will be pretty accessible as is: They'll available at a public site via NNTP (without any requirement for snews support), available via standard email lists, and available via Google Groups. At the moment I believe that the marginal utility of propagating to Usenet at large is not worth the downside risk of getting more spam as a result of doing that. This is particularly true since the decision is irreversible.

As previously noted, we can continue to discuss this issue, particularly with regard to the option of propagating selected groups to Usenet as a test. However I think that that discussion should go on in the newsgroups/mailing lists, probably in mozilla.dev.mozilla-org or the corresponding mailing list. I don't accept the argument that "the people affected negatively by this will be underrepresented in the groups" and therefore this bug should be reopened to allow such discussions. If people are able to find their way to an arbitrarily-numbered Bugzilla bug (i.e., this one) then they can just as easily subscribe and post to m.d.mozilla-org, via email if for whatever reason they can't get to news.mozilla.org.
I don't accept the argument that it is necessary to cut off group propagation to reduce spam, or, more accurately, I don't accept that it's necessary to reduce spam at all. The existing groups have hardly any spam at all that I've seen.
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.