527919 - Obtain a list of extension author email addresses so that the SeaMonkey Council can mass mail them (like Thunderbird did)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Administration, defect, P5)

Description

[Philip Chee]

Recently Mozilla Messaging mass mailed Thunderbird extension authors reminding them to update their extensions for Thunderbird 3.0. At the last SeaMonkey Status Meeting we agreed that it would be a good idea to mass mail SeaMonkey extension authors similarly.

<https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=SeaMonkey:StatusMeetings:2009-11-03#Any_other_business.3F>

Ideally we would also want to contact Firefox and Thunderbird extension authors as well to encourage them to make their extensions compatible with SeaMonkey 2.0.

So how do we extract a list of email addresses from AMO?

Comment 1

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

Please give us the text of the email you'd like to be sent, along with specific criteria for the recipients, and we'll have this sent for you.

For criteria, I mean something like "all add-ons that have SeaMonkey support with a current maxVersion of 1.0.*".

Comment 2

[Philip Chee]

Attachment: Draft F1.0 for Firefox and Thunderbird extension authors.

Comment 3

[Philip Chee]

Comment on attachment 415366 [details]
Draft F1.0 for Firefox and Thunderbird extension authors.

Oops.
- Draft S1.0 for existing SeaMonkey 2.0b extensions
+ Draft F1.0 for Firefox and Thunderbird extension authors.

Comment 4

[Philip Chee]

Attachment: Draft S1.0 for existing SeaMonkey 2.0b extension authors. r=KaiRo

Comment 5

[Ian Neal]

Comment on attachment 415366 [details]
Draft F1.0 for Firefox and Thunderbird extension authors.

>3. Adjust a few item IDs in your overlay that are different with Firefox's browser.xul.
"to" instead of "with" perhaps?

>Still leary of porting your extension to SeaMonkey 2.0? Have a look at the list of extensions that have been ported to SeaMonkey:
Is "leary" the correct word here? "wary" maybe?

Comment 6

[Karsten Düsterloh]

(In reply to comment #5)
>> 3. Adjust a few item IDs in your overlay that are different 
>> with Firefox's browser.xul.
> "to" instead of "with" perhaps?

Me no English, but wouldn't "from" be more comprehensible?

Comment 7

[Philip Chee]

<http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxdiffer.html>

""Different from" is the construction that no one will object to.
"Different to" is fairly common informally in the U.K., but rare in
the U.S.  "Different than" is sometimes used to avoid the cumbersome
"different from that which", etc. (e.g., "a very different Pamela
than I used to leave all company and pleasure for" -- Samuel
Richardson).  Some U.S. speakers use "different than" exclusively."

"from" it is.

Comment 8

[Philip Chee]

Attachment: F1.1 for Firefox and Thunderbird extension authors. r=KaiRo

Comment 9

[Robert Kaiser]

Comment on attachment 415367 [details]
Draft S1.0 for existing SeaMonkey 2.0b extension authors. r=KaiRo

Sounds good to me though I strongly believe that specific names under a message make people listen more - and your name even seems to be pretty known in parts of the add-ons community. What about signing as "Philip Chee and the SeaMonkey team" (or Council instead of team, if you prefer, but I'm trying hard to point at our larger team than just the official vehicle of the Council).

I also wonder if we should target people specifically which ever had some add-on version that was compatible with any SeaMonkey version.

Comment 10

[Robert Kaiser]

Comment on attachment 417490 [details]
F1.1 for Firefox and Thunderbird extension authors. r=KaiRo

r=me with the same comment about signing the message.

Also, what specific (as in search on AMO) criteria do we have for whom to send the messages to?

Comment 11

[Philip Chee]

Comment on attachment 415367 [details]
Draft S1.0 for existing SeaMonkey 2.0b extension authors. r=KaiRo

KaiRo says review not needed and that I have rs for this bug.

Comment 12

[Philip Chee]

Comment on attachment 415367 [details]
Draft S1.0 for existing SeaMonkey 2.0b extension authors. r=KaiRo

Eeek! too quick on the trigger finger

Comment 13

[Philip Chee]

Attachment: F1.2 for Firefox and Thunderbird extension authors. r=KaiRo

Fixed grammar nits and changed ending to "Phil Chee on behalf of the SeaMonkey Team."

For AMO admins. Extension author selection criteria:
Authors with Firefox and Thunderbird extensions which currently aren't SeaMonkey compatible.

Comment 14

[Philip Chee]

Attachment: S1.2 for extension authors whose SeaMonkey extensions haven't been updated for 2.0. r=KaiRo

S1.2 for SeaMonkey extension authors. r=KaiRo

Fixed grammar nits and changed ending to "Phil Chee on behalf of the SeaMonkey
Team."

For AMO admins. Extension author selection criteria:
Authors with SeaMonkey extensions which haven't been updated for SeaMonkey 2.0.

Comment 15

[Philip Chee]

> I also wonder if we should target people specifically which ever had some
> add-on version that was compatible with any SeaMonkey version.

I'm not sure if AMO can pull that info out of the database easily.

Comment 16

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

I'm not sure about emailing all Firefox and Thunderbird developers on AMO. We get a lot of complaints every time we send out emails to Firefox developers, and have lots of people opt-out from our compatibility mailings.

I don't think I want to risk the opt-outs that something like this would generate. Since we don't have per-application compatibility opt-out preferences, the opt-outs would hurt future Firefox emails.

I'm fine with sending out emails to developers that already support SeaMonkey, but I don't think we should email everyone. Emailing everyone to try to get SeaMonkey support is more a marketing email than a compatibility one.

Comment 17

[Philip Chee]

> I'm fine with sending out emails to developers that already support SeaMonkey,

So it's a go for that message. Great!

> Emailing everyone to try to get
> SeaMonkey support is more a marketing email than a compatibility one.

Right, and that was the original plan, but you don't seem keen on giving out the necessary contact information. How do we get a list of email addresses so that we can do our own marketing email? Perhaps a list of addresses of the top 20/30/40/50 extensions that are not already SeaMonkey 2.0 compatible?

As an alternative, how about putting  the text in vF1.2 into the addons blog (which gets syndicated to planet.mozilla.org).

Comment 18

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

(In reply to comment #17)
> As an alternative, how about putting  the text in vF1.2 into the addons blog
> (which gets syndicated to planet.mozilla.org).

That sounds like a good idea to me: It's unobtrusive, yet has a high outreach.

Comment 19

[Philip Chee]

> I'm fine with sending out emails to developers that already support SeaMonkey,

Just to clarify, can we include developers that have extensions that *used* to support SeaMonkey/Mozilla Suite but dropped support in more recent versions? In my experience porting those Firefox extensions to SeaMonkey, they usually still have a lot of dormant Suite code that just needed to have some bit rot fixed and then turned on.

Comment 20

[Robert Kaiser]

Comment #18 and comment #19 seem a good way to go:

1) We'd like to directly reach anyone who ever supported SeaMonkey as a number of those might have done that just because the differences between SeaMonkey 1.x and Firefox/Thunderbird became too large - now that we're on the same platform and add-ons system, bringing support back should be relatively easy for those - and they already supported us once. The compatibility mail seems right for that case.

2) We'd like to inform as many add-ons devs as possible in a hopefully not too intrusive way that supporting once more application and an additional user base of tens of thousands with some often very easy steps.

Currently, one of the sore points of the completely reworked 2.0 version is that we don't have a good number of add-ons working with it yet, and we'd like to work on that as fast as possible. Having the AMO compatibility center working would have been nice, but it didn't happen yet, so I hope this approach will help us somewhat at least.

Comment 21

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

What's the status of this bug?  Does it still need to be assigned to Philip?

Comment 22

[Philip Chee]

I've written the texts and have SeaMonkey approvals. It's now up to AMO to push out the email and the blog posts. Who should I reassign this phase to?

Comment 23

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

Jorge, can you take care of this? This bug needs:

1. the email sent out to all add-on authors that support SeaMonkey but not version 2.0.* yet

2. a blog post on the add-ons blog for general awareness of add-ons in SeaMonkey 2.0

Comment 24

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

Since I'm sending this to developers supporting older versions of SeaMonkey as well, I'd like to replace:
"We've noticed that one or more of your add-ons are compatible with a beta version of SeaMonkey 2.0"
to:
"We've noticed that one or more of your add-ons are compatible with SeaMonkey"

Comment 25

[Robert Kaiser]

(In reply to comment #24)
> Since I'm sending this to developers supporting older versions of SeaMonkey as
> well, I'd like to replace:
> "We've noticed that one or more of your add-ons are compatible with a beta
> version of SeaMonkey 2.0"
> to:
> "We've noticed that one or more of your add-ons are compatible with SeaMonkey"

Jorge, thanks, good catch, I fully agree with this, please make it so!

Comment 26

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

IT will send the email within a week. I'll make the blog post at the same time.

Comment 27

[Robert Kaiser]

(In reply to comment #26)
> IT will send the email within a week. I'll make the blog post at the same time.

Cool, thanks a lot!

Comment 28

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

No reply from IT yet. Moving to 5.7.

Comment 29

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

I sent the message today. I'll make the blog post on Wednesday since today I made another post that I want to have some more attention.

Comment 30

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

Blog post is up: http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2010/02/17/updating-to-seamonkey-2/

This is fixed now.

Comment 31

[Philip Chee]

Thank you Jorge!