Discussion Forums/Request For Comment

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Mozilla is interested in gathering feedback on how the community feels about the state of Discussion Forums (mailing lists, newsgroups) and how they can be improved.

Please contribute to this document.

Status Quo

At present, Mozilla IT manages two Mailman v2 instances, one for 'simple' Mailing Lists (various -AT-mozilla.org addresses) and the other for a Newsgroups + Mailing Lists (a.k.a. "Discussion Forums") which have @lists.mozilla.org email addresses which are also synced with corresponding Newsgroups hosted at nntp://news.mozilla.org/ provided by GigaNews and synced to Google Groups.

Discussion Forums are the primary form of communication for projects within Mozilla, and are available over the most kinds of mediums: email, newsgroup or via Google Groups' web interface; all posts are synced (hopefully) across all other mediums, and the user not bothered with the details. To encourage the largest range of voices, we want to be available in a seamless way to as many formats and devices as possible.

Problems

SPAM

SPAM has been a consistent problem in the past and is tricky problem to solve outright. IT is deploying a well-trained Spam Assassin to catching incoming junk mail. SPAM that originates from Google Groups or from GigaNews' side (news.mozilla.org) is outside our direct control at the moment.

Google Groups Syncing

Currently, we rely on Google Groups to provide an interactive web-accessible archive for Discussion Forum posts. We do this by modifying the Mailman listinfo template. In contrast, standard Mailing Lists still provide a static archive of the mailing list posts to it.

For various reasons, Google Groups has had trouble reliably syncing posts from outside of its own interface, including blocking email posts from showing up correctly on the Google Groups newsgroup page. This inconsistency caused confusion and fragmentation of the project's attempts at conversation.

Newsgroup gateways break threading

The 2.x mailman we are using clobbers message-id's when gatewaying messages from mailing lists to newsgroups. Because of the naive way in which this is done, this breaks hierarchical threading in mail clients like Thunderbird. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=651527 for more.

This may not be obvious to people using the gmail web client because it only orders messages chronologically and it uses a mixture of content analysis to establish conversation groupings.

(added by asuth)

Duplicate messages (from Google Groups)

It's pretty common as a subscriber of our mailing lists to receive duplicate messages that seem to involve multi-path issues. There may actually be several variations on this, but an obvious one is on dev-webapps where Jason Smith's posts from google groups (I believe that's what User-Agent: G2/1.0 is) show up twice as a mailing list subscriber. This is not a message-id issue; the 'to' on one of the lists is "mozilla-dev-webapps@lists.mozilla.org" (with mozilla-dev-webapps@lists.mozilla.org) and on the other is "mozilla.dev.webapps@googlegroups.com" (with X-Original-To: dev-webapps@lists.mozilla.org).

(added by asuth)

<<insert your own>>

Desired Features

Web Interface

The ability to reliably post from a webpage to a Discussion Forum (as would be expected in a traditional 'Web Forum') is sorely lacking from Mozilla. Google Groups (as mentioned previously) is not always reliable with our forums, and has a distinctly foreign feel.

Mailman currently can only provide a read-only archive of messages.

Mobile

A tablet or mobile-friendly interface, as a growing number of users will be using Firefox for Android, etc.

Improved Moderation tools

Being able to crowd-source the task of moderation would be a great way to encourage participation and ease the burden of current List Admins.

Make it easier to spin up new mailing lists

There is often the need to create a mailing list, even short lived, for a project. The "file an IT bug or use google groups" results in just not creating a mailing list.

URLs in email from list

Just as it is very important for mailing lists to have a usable archive, messages from the list should have a link to that archive thread. This is one of the major shortcomings of google groups.

Better interopability with other tools

A hard and open ended one. Mailing lists should work with and extend the existing Mozilla infrastructure in meaningful ways.

<<insert your own>>

Suggested Improvements

Mailman version 3

Mailman v3, has a number of promising advancements that could improve the current state of our Discussion Forums.

  • Multi-domain support.
    • Allows IT to combine the two separate instances of Mailman, potentially.
  • Persona (OpenID) Support
    • no more shared Admin passwords, no more monthly subscription reminders
  • Web interface (Django) for administration
  • Improved web API, allows for automation of common tasks (subscribe, create)
  • http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Mailman+3.0

Jive Social Intranet

Nabble

Gmane

Buddycloud

<<insert your own>>

Miscellaneous

Mozillian Diaspora

Open Source 'Social Newsfeed' software exists. Should Mozilla pursue hosting Social Network tools for Mozillians (community members and volunteers, plus Mozilla employees)?

Mozillian Jabber

Modern Jabber (XMMP) is a flexible instant messaging system. Mozilla could create chatrooms that synchronize to corresponding IRC channels, but be available over a protocol supported by most modern Instant Messaging clients that new users are more likely to have. This would facilitate easier 1-on-1 communication in a safe and secure way, possibly even making use of @mozillian.org account names.

  • syncs to IRC
  • provides secure 1:1 and multiuser chatrooms
  • connect with Adium, Messages.app, Pidgin, etc

Relevant Reading

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