MozillaZine

Mozilla Staff Seeking Volunteer to Set Up and Manage mozilla.org News Server

Sunday April 25th, 2004

fantasai writes: "The Mozilla newsgroup reorganization has been in the plans for several years. Now that it's no longer dependent on AOL IC doing something, staff wants to make this happen. However, Mozilla's newsgroups are still hosted on Netscape's servers. While the Mozilla Foundation has the hardware for running its own news server, it has no spare resources to actually set it up, create the new groups, work out a transition plan and so on. If any experienced news admins out there want to help out, the job application is bug 215294. The reorganization plan would set up new groups for web developers and end-users, reorganize the Mozilla developers' groups, and pull them all out from under Netscape's name."

#1 Secure

by Grauw

Monday April 26th, 2004 3:57 AM

I hope the new development groups will be private on a secure server, and possibly some public user help groups. That way the use of development groups as user help forums will be avoided.

~Grauw

#2 Re: Secure

by mlefevre

Monday April 26th, 2004 8:23 AM

I think the plan is for all the new groups to be on a private server. In practice, there's really no way to create groups on other servers. The netscape.public.* hierarchy was set up a long time ago. These days there's really no way to "turn off" or rename those groups that are distributed on so many news servers, nor to create a new hierarchy that would get any kind of useful distribution.

The current draft plan that's floating around has clearly named user and developer groups, all in one place. Like that, it's much less likely that people will get into the wrong group accidentally.

#3 Re: Re: Secure

by Grauw

Monday April 26th, 2004 12:20 PM

Sounds good :). I'm getting tired of having all groups marked as unread by the same spam messages... And there's too little developer-oriented talk. Though I'm not a Mozilla developer, I am more interested in that than yet another 'how to turn off newsgroup abbreviation' or 'where is my profile folder' message :).

~Grauw

#6 Re: Re: Secure

by JanC

Monday May 3rd, 2004 1:49 PM

In practice, it's not that difficult to get a new hierarchy. Just ask the big Usenet providers to distribute it & others will follow when their users request it...

#4 whhy not google groups ?

by mariuz

Monday April 26th, 2004 1:15 PM

They have the bandwidth / and lot's of servers ...

#5 Re: whhy not google groups ?

by RMo

Monday April 26th, 2004 2:08 PM

To my knowledge, all Google is is a giant Web-based archive of (exisiting) Usenet newsgroups--i.e., a duplication and slightly different way of accessing what already exists, so one can't actually "create" a group because that's not what the service is.