Asa, I tend to agree with you, but here's a hint for the future:

When you characterize another user's post as "whiny bitching," ore use the term Boo-hoo, you have ceased to participate in discussion and have launched into flame war. You have therefore lost the rational argument by default. Please refrain from such childish antics. You honestly sound like you're in the fifth grade.

Honestly.

hm, this was childish indeed!

yes firefox is great, but why flame other people who think it is great?

this is by far not the way to address anybody in the great firefox community. especially by an official.

thumbs down, asa.

~Umko

> We _are_ a grassroots movement and there's nothing wrong with this project utilizing all of it's resources the best way it can

While I agree with this, I do not agree with using this line of defence for everything that happens in the community. While it is true that Asa and Blake explicitly ask people to give honest reviews both in the initial announcements and their respective blogs, it is also true that MozillaZine (where most fans go for information) has not publicly denounced unfair reviews. I do not know if MozillaZine is the proper bulletin board for such thing. However, the project did cause some controversey and we did need a open channel where we could calm people down.

I do not think anyone here argue against the intention of the project. We know Asa and Blake meant well. However, the project had many faults. The poll system on download.com was too open and thus open to spamming. We did not have a place where participants can talk about the campaign. We did not have a place where those who started the campaign can respond to criticism and events that happened. The initial announcement did not contain strong enough a message against fraudent reviews.

There are things we can improve. I urge Asa and Blake to more openly accept criticism and suggestion to improvements. I also urge everybody who disagrees with the first campaign to calm down. What we need is constructive discussion on what can go wrong with this campaign and how to prevent that. There is no point starting a war here over what happened in week 1.

Week two should be better. We are not targeting any particular press, and we are not suggesting any particular action. Instead, we open a mailing list and ask people to suggest what news articles to respond to (or not to respond to) and what kind of actions to take. Discovering and responding to news articles take some effort, and this should ensure that most participants will be more thoughtful and not take shortcuts. The marketing aims here are accuracy and fairness. If a reporter recommands another browser or criticizes Firefox or Mozilla, but does so with facts and logics, I'm sure most participants will let the reporter go and some would even praise the reporter.

The action that is emphasized here (or at least I think should be emphasized) is fact finding, not the actual response. As I wrote in a message to Raiph (who was working on a similar but independent project):

. Lots of news out there are misleading and contain wrong or incomplete information. . We need a place where people can get the correct information before sending out . comments. Having such info ready, furthermore, would has more substance than . notes on NPOV and propaganda. An informed audience will be able to send out NPOV . comments without being told to.

Responding to press is nothing new. We have been talking about this ever since the marketing-public mailing list opened. Most participants will be serious people. There is just no comparison between the first campaign and the second.

If he was posting anonymously for that reason, he probably wouldn't have made an identical post in blake's blog with his name and email address attached, and then referred to it in this post.

Coming out and flaming people, trolls or otherwise, just leads to more trolling, flaming, and whining. I'm not sure I'd say this was trolling anyway - it's quite well-reasoned whining, although it's about the previous effort, so it's a bit late.

It's happened more than once -- both here, on Blake's blog, and certainly elsewhere -- that anyone with any reasonable objection to the Download.com campaign is accused of "bitching" and "trolling". I'm certainly the last person to have any blanket objections to getting the Firefox name out there, but while I agree with this marketing gesture in spirit, it just seemed like an extremely counter-productive method.

The point I tried to make with _my_ objection was, in a nutshell, this: like many other people who are occasionally forced to find information about software at Download.com, I typically see an unusually high number of votes or an atypically high score as suspect. Someone pointed out that such an effort would serve to balance out the usual inequities at the site, but it's only served to encourage them further, as seen by the unpleasant side-effect of those who chose to slight competing products in the process (regardless of what was asked of them, it was bound to happen). It's fairly common knowledge that the imbalance in Download.com's system is generally perpetuated by representatives of corporate entities attempting to artificially skew the rankings. Even though these efforts for Firebird are, on the surface, an innocent attempt at honest grassroots evangelism, it could quite possibly give the same perceived effect.

I'd just like to say that, well, ending a post named "Quit your whiny bitching" with "Seriously, grow up" is somewhat hypocrital.

Other than that, I have nothing to say about your post. I'm disappointed, frankly.

To everyone else:

I wasn't meaning to flame, troll, whine, whatever. If it came across that way, I'm sorry. I was just trying to make people realize that things like the Opera rating war are a <b>bad</b> thing that were, unfortunately, started by some members of the MozillaZine community, and they need to be openly denounced. The fact of the matter is, no matter if you ask for honest reviews and the like, it's

Yes, I use the mr_anon account - because I've made a total of like 3 or 4 comments on the MozillaZine frontpage, and didn't think it worth registering for that. Just FYI, my name IRL is Dougal Sutherland. My email is dougal@gmail.com. My forums account is w0073r. My AIM account is also w0073r. My Yahoo account is better_aao_champ. My MSN account is dougal@math.sunysb.edu (guess what my secondary email is). If you look up SUNYSB, that stands for State University of New York - Stony Brook, which is a university on Long Island, which applies I have some kind of connection with the math department there (which is true). Hell, my IP is 24.47.51.75 :p If you bother to look that up, that means I use Optimum Online, which is owned by Cablevision and operates in the northeast US.

That satisfy you? If you want, I'll even sign up, though it seems a waste as I doubt I'll be posting very much.

danielwang and Gnu got what I was trying to say pretty much right, and I absolutely agree with everything else they said.

~~w0073r

>Quit your whining. >Boo-hoo! >This community has better things to do than get dragged down by whiners. >Seriously, grow up.

As an out-front spokesman for Mozilla I think you've really got to work on the tone of your discourse, the aggressive language and outright mean nature of the above post really reflects poorly on you, and ultimately on Mozilla as a whole. I know you see complaints all day, every day, I know you do a hell of a lot of work for Mozilla and have for quite some time (writing comments in the forums, writing build comments back when you did that, etc), you deserve a lot of praise for the hard work and dedication you've shown, but I don't think that gives you carte blanche to ridicule people publically.

In my opinion when you've got @mozilla.org attached to your email address you're speaking for Mozilla, as such despite how angry some posts make you feel I think you have a responsibility to respond in a reasonable manner. In order to make myself more clear I'll use an example: say I call Dell and start berating the tech support person because my stupid machine broke, I say they make lousy equipment and don't know what the hell they're doing. After some time the technician determines my laptop isn't working because I spilled a glass of orange juice on it. Despite the fact that he knows it's my fault he's still not allowed to start belittling me, he can calmly explain to the customer that Dell can't be held responsible for that sort of incident, but he must maintain a reasonable and professional tone.

Now, I'm guessing you're not getting paid to do this, but even as a volunteer you're still representing Mozilla, what you say can affect people's perceptions of the project and the organization. It's counterprodutive to the long-term goals of the organization to use this manner of speech towards anyone. If you really wish to get something off your chest might I recommend making a second account using a non-mozilla.org address, so that the opinions you express can't be construed to be the opinions of the organization?

Maybe this all seems a little ridiculous to you, but I feel that ultimately a friendlier, more helpful attitude will positively the public's perception of Mozilla, and ultimately the adoption of the browser and mail client.

Heh.. bugmenot is easy to beat.. no need to get admins involved.

I just logged into the forums from two accounts mentioned on bugmenot... and.. changed their **** passwords! Whine away.

It doesn't really bother me. I set up an account here for the rare posting I do here. I think I could trust this place not to sell my e-mail address to some spam company.

As to the solution of anonymous posting, I've seen it on sites such as Livejournal that require a verification image/sound to prevent spambots from spamming forums like this. However, it would still require some moderation in case a real human puts in the effort to spam this forum 20 million times.