328381 - mozilla.support.general needs a better name

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(mozilla.org :: Discussion Forums, task, P1)

Description

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

mozilla.support.general is intended as a support group for Mozilla products that don't currently have a dedicated newsgroup/list, but most posts in it are by people under the impression it is for general support issues.

The equivalent dev group is mozilla.dev.apps.other; so right now, I would rename mozilla.support.general to mozilla.support.other. There's a possibility that it would be interpreted as support for non-mozilla products, but at least there wouldn't be any overlap with other current support groups.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Gerv: thoughts?  makes sense to me.  renames are painful though :(

Comment 2

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

FWIW, there are currently five members on the list.

Comment 3

[Philip Chee]

A monthly READMENOW or mini FAQ posted to the newsgroup should be sufficient.

Comment 4

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> A monthly READMENOW or mini FAQ posted to the newsgroup should be sufficient.

Such measures do not work, and never have. It was done in the old groups to direct user traffic. I posted a message in mozilla.support.firefox almost a couple of weeks ago, regarding bug 326634, and there are still at least a couple of posts per day from Google users.

One of the reasons for not propagating to usenet is that MoFo would have the power remove/create groups. The groups are so young right now, lets fix them properly, before it really is too late.

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

It's a fair point. And we are doing renames early rather than later when it's more painful (there's another bug about doing some). If it's already causing problems after a couple of weeks, those aren't going to magically disappear. Let's do it. It's not a rename, though. It's a "this group never existed. Honest. Oh look, here's a new group with a similar charter". No migration. Let's keep it simple.

Gerv

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

shaver, dria, bsmedberg: are you OK with this?

Gerv

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

shaver doesn't object, he told me by phone.

Dave: can we just go ahead and do this and get it over with? :-)

Thanks,

Gerv

Comment 8

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

OK, so just to clarify...  we're creating mozilla.support.other, and not nuking mozilla.support.general for now? (but probably nuking it eventually?)

Comment 9

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

If there's going to be an overlap, it should be a very short time (IMO).

Comment 10

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

dave: nuke it immediately. Again, it's only a few weeks of traffic (although more the longer we wait!) - losing it for posterity is not a disaster.

Let's do it :-)

Gerv

Comment 11

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Is there anything preventing this from happening now?

Comment 12

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

No.

Gerv

Comment 13

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Just me not getting around to it.

We've got a collection of minor tweaks to the group list started, I'm going to try to get them together so I can request them all at once this weekend.  It's less hassle with Google Groups that way.

Comment 14

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

Did this big shuffle happen?

Comment 15

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

(In reply to comment #14)
> Did this big shuffle happen?

No, not yet. :(

Comment 16

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

support-other mailing list has been created, admin password has been mailed to Chris.  The list will remain hidden until the corresponding newsgroup shows up on news.mozilla.org.

newgroup request has been submitted to Giganews.  Based on previous experience it may be a couple weeks before it shows up on Google Groups.

I will proceed with the rmgroup of mozilla.support.general as soon as mozilla.support.other works.

Comment 17

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

It's now on news.mozilla.org.
I guess we're gonna wait until it's on Google Groups, before announcing its existence?

Comment 18

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Hadn't heard anything back from Giganews saying they'd done it, but the newly named version showed up in my newsreader just now. :)

I've unhidden the list.

Still waiting to hear from Google, of course.

Comment 19

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Google Group looks to be up:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.support.other

Comment 20

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

w00t, Google's on the ball, Google Groups mirror on mozilla.support.other is all set.  This is now waiting on deprecation announcements and closing the old group now.  I'm on vacation this weekend, so I'll probably do the announcements on Monday and aim to close it Friday next week.

Comment 21

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Monday has gone, and there's no announcement; so this is a reminder, in case you forgot. :-)

Comment 22

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Announcement has been posted.

I'll give it a week before requesting the old newsgroup be nuked.

Comment 23

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

rmgroup request for mozilla.support.general has been sent to both Giganews and Google.

Comment 24

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Giganews has removed it. Still waiting on Google to disable posting to it.

Comment 25

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Google has disabled posting to mozilla.support.general, and put their "You cannot post messages because this group is only available as an archive" header on it. This bug looks fixed to me. :-)

Comment 26

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Hmm. Looks like I was wrong earlier, about Google disabling posting to mozilla.support.general. I'll keep my mouth shut now. :-)

Comment 27

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

yeah, I heard back from Giganews, haven't heard from Google yet.

Comment 28

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I just spot-checked this, Google appears to still be allowing posting here.  I'll remind them about it when I do this month's batch.

Comment 29

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Google is still allowing posting here (and there's been some recently!)

I included a reminder that it's supposed to be on archived status in tonight's batch of newsgroup requests that I sent them.

Comment 30

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I've sent another reminder to Google that we're still waiting for this group to be closed.

Comment 31

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I've sent yet another reminder to Google that mozilla.support.general is still waiting to be put in archived status.

Comment 32

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Yay, finally done.  mozilla.support.general now shows read-only on Google Groups.