Discussion Forums/Problem Statement

This is a "problem statement" trying to explain what problem our current Discussion Forums are attempting to solve. As the current solution is not awesome, people often get to thinking about how to make it better. However, one must understand the problem trying to be solved, and possible constraints on the solution, first. This page attempts to explain.

High Level Problem Statement

Provide a public, asynchronous, multiple participant, written, archived, searchable, filterable communications mechanism for the Mozilla project.

Rationale

• Public: an open project needs public communications
• Asynchronous: with people all around the world, the primary communications need to be not-real-time
• Multiple participant: we are a community
• Written: written means easy to search, easy to translate
• Archived: we need to find out what people have said in the past
• Searchable: we need to be able to find what they said
• Filterable: no-one can read every project communication; there needs to be a way of splitting by topic

Current Solution

The current solution is somewhat documented, and is built around the idea of a set of unified forums, arranged topically, accessible via 3 different mechanisms - email, NNTP (news) and the web. It is read/write via all three mechanisms. It involves partnerships with Giganews (for newsgroups) and Google (for web-based Google Groups).

Current Problems

The outsourcing is sub-optimal because Google, in particular, are not very responsive to reports of problems. As I write, much of the gatewaying to Groups is broken.

We don't have complete control of the spam problem. A proposal exists to make that better, but requires time from IT.

Also, the gatewaying is not exactly perfect, and threading can break in some circumstances.

Possible Improvement Q & A

Why can't we ditch the newsgroup part? I hate newsgroups. That'll make things better.

It's not at all clear that removing this requirement will make any difference. As long as we have mailing lists, we can convert them to news in various ways, including the gmane.org service (where anyone can apply to have it done, not just us). Also, the last time we did a survey, a significant proportion of current users used this access method.

Why can't we ditch the mailing list part? I hate mailing lists. That'll make things better.

For an organization which makes a mail client, this would be a... surprising move. Also, the last time we did a survey, a significant proportion of current users used this access method.

Why can't we ditch the web part? I hate the web. That'll make things better.

For an organization which makes a web browser, this would be a... surprising move. The web is also the only way to provide convenient searchable archives, so there needs to be some web presence for the forums. It might be possible to ditch the writeability of the web-based access method (i.e. just have archives, not posting). Also, you may have heard this before, but the last time we did a survey, a significant proportion of current users used this access method.

Why can't we go news-only? One thing is much easier to maintain than three.

Get back to 1983, old-timer.

(Written by someone who uses newsgroups as their primary access method today :-)

Why can't we go mail-only? One thing is much easier to maintain than three.

Presumably you mean mail-only with a web-based archive? Amazingly, it seems the open source community has still not managed to come up with mailing list management software with a decent web-based archiving interface. We could, perhaps, accept a sucky one.

Why can't we go web-only? One thing is much easier to maintain than three.

The UI of web-based discussion forums, particularly with relation to threading and unread message markers, still hasn't caught up with email and news. It's very hard to consume a large quantity of information this way.

Why don't we bring it all in-house?

That's a good idea, and would certainly give us more control; the current blocking problem is a deployable web-based read/write UI (or even, for that matter, a decent read-only UI). The mailing lists part is already in-house; bringing the newsgroups in-house wouldn't solve much of the problem.

Summary

This page is not supposed to be "why we can't change anything", but it does set out some of the things which show why the solution is not simple.