At 01:27 08/12/2000 +0100, Ben Bucksch wrote:
>Gervase Markham wrote:
>
>>>9. I'd really like a mozilla.users group.
>>Just one?
>
>I object that.
>
>mozilla.org policy has always been "developers only". That's why I created
>Beonex, and bought a users mailing list. We need to stick to one policy -
>either Mozilla is for users, and we adjust the website and the binaries
>etc. accordingly, or it isn't, and then, the hierarchy is wrong here.
>Having no clear policy only leads to confusion and problems.
>
>One concrete example: I think that this one group won't attract the right
>traffic (completely uninteresting user problems like "How do I...?").
>Having read the .mail-news group long time, I guess that people just
>search for "mail" and pick the best-looking group. Since there is no
>netscape.communicator.mail-news, they post to n.p.mozilla.mail-news.
>Exactly the same will happen, if there is only "users". Since we now have
>"m.dev.apps.browser", we will even have the same problem in that group,
>too. So, either you create m.users.mail-news, m.users.browser etc. from
>the beginning (which would have the problem of suggesting that Mozilla is
>for users), or don't even start with m.users.
I agree and disagree. Yes distributors should do more of the end user
support and mozilla.org should point users to the right place to get that
support. With Beonex its likely they'll stay with Beonex for support, the
myriad Netscape 6 users though won't, even after the Great Renaming. For
those users that stray into mozilla.org user groups they need to be steered
correctly into the right channel for their distribution. If a user picks
up a milestone or nightly release (and by doing so they've qualified
themselves as being different to a casual user), then they should get
supported (and currently do), within mozilla.org.
Nor do I think that users should be dissuaded from getting nightlies and
milestones because its only by having a disparate and random distribution
that we will get the many eyes and hands that are needed to show bugs and
uncover feature requirements. That's also why I want the wishlist group
kept, but separated from the developer group.
Simon
