837757 - Forums page link for Community Tools is broken

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(mozilla.org :: Discussion Forums, task, P4)

Description

[William Reynolds [:williamr]]

The link on the Forums page to the Community Tools newsgroup on Google is broken. I'm not sure if the link is wrong of the group is named incorrectly. The difference is the use of dashes (-) instead of periods (.).

Working link: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-dev-community-tools/topics
Broken link: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.community-tools/topics

Page: http://www.mozilla.org/about/forums/

What is the proper solution?

Comment 1

[Jennifer Bertsch [:jbertsch]]

Hi WilliamR-

I think the proper solution is that Gerv will need to update the link in his script - is the script updates the web links. 

Otherwise, we'll ask a web prod developer to update it.

Thx,
Jen

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

The Google Group has a non-standard name :-| The standard is to have the name exactly match the newsgroup name, with dots where there are dots and hyphens where there are hyphens. Your working link is all hyphens.

mburns: any ideas what happened here?

Gerv

Comment 3

[Jennifer Bertsch [:jbertsch]]

Hi William-

Could you please follow up with M Burns?

Thx,
Jen

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Related: bug 844801 (newsgroup not working).

Gerv

Comment 5

[Michael Burns [:mburns]]

This one threw me for a loop at first, I'm sorry to not gotten to it sooner.

The Community Tools list should not, in fact, be listed at all on the Forums page at all. In bug 754317, we decided against using a Discussion Forum, and went with a direct Google Group. Giganews did not get the notification to turn this off, so they are /expecting/ a lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-community-tools to exist (and which, briefly, did).

The "working" Google Groups link in comment 0 is just *very* similarly named to what Mailman would convert the newsgroup to (tricksy hobbitses).

Giganews has been notified, and is going to shut off the 'broken' link later today.


However, that doesn't really fix the problem you're asking for. To get a working link on the Forums page would require one of two paths:

1. Ask the great and powerful :Gerv to add an exception in his script to explicitly link to the forum, on top of the nntp-scraped newsgroups that are listed. (not exactly elegant)

2. Now that Google Groups has been (consistently) working for a couple months, I would consider migrating to proper Discussion Forum. This might be too much of a hassle to ask of your users, though, if you can get a subscription list as Google Group moderator, we could auto-subscribe the users.

I don't know of a particularly simple way to get the existing ~20 threads into mbox file, but if we did, that could be imported into Mailman.

Thoughts?

Comment 6

[Michael Burns [:mburns]]

This (empty) newsgroup is no longer hosted by Giganews, and the Mailman (and Google Groups) pages are both deleted.

The list is also no long in https://lists.mozilla.org/newsgroups.txt, so I expect this entry to be removed the next time this Forum script is ran to scrap everything up (Monday? --gerv?)

Bumping your way so you can decide how to proceed (comment 5)

Comment 7

[Jennifer Bertsch [:jbertsch]]

link is removed.  closing.

Comment 8

[William Reynolds [:williamr]]

(In reply to Michael Burns [:mburns] from comment #5)
> However, that doesn't really fix the problem you're asking for. To get a
> working link on the Forums page would require one of two paths:
> 
> 1. Ask the great and powerful :Gerv to add an exception in his script to
> explicitly link to the forum, on top of the nntp-scraped newsgroups that are
> listed. (not exactly elegant)
> 
> 2. Now that Google Groups has been (consistently) working for a couple
> months, I would consider migrating to proper Discussion Forum. This might be
> too much of a hassle to ask of your users, though, if you can get a
> subscription list as Google Group moderator, we could auto-subscribe the
> users.
> 
> I don't know of a particularly simple way to get the existing ~20 threads
> into mbox file, but if we did, that could be imported into Mailman.
> 
> Thoughts?

Thanks mburns for the suggested paths.

Our team would like the Community Tools forum to be just as accessible as other forums, and right now it only exists as a Google Group. Would love to migrate it a proper Discussion Forum as you mentioned (path 2). I'm not too worried about importing existing threads or auto-subscribing members. It's currently a low traffic forum, but we're hoping to increase the activity.

Reopening in the hopes we can migrate to a Discussion Forum, but please let me know if this should be handled in another bug. Thanks!

Comment 9

[Michael Burns [:mburns]]

Sounds good to me.

I've started the process and reopened the original bug to track progress. A day or so for Giganews, and (hopefully) Google Groups the following Monday. Fingers crossed :)

Comment 10

[Michael Burns [:mburns]]

http://good.news.everyone.jpg.to/

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/mozilla.dev.community-tools