community

We host some mailing lists and newsgroups at mozilla.org, to foster open communication in the developer community. We add new forums with some regularity, in response to the needs of you, the developers. What forums do you want? As new special-interest groups appear, we will create new newsgroups and mailing lists, or whatever seems most useful. Let us know. For an overview of the hottest newsgroup articles and threads, check out NewsBot.

For now, we plan to use the traditional Usenet approach for deciding when a new forum should be created: that is, new forums are created when interest has been demonstrated by existing traffic. So, if there is not a newsgroup or mailing list specific to the topic that you are interested in, pick the one that is the closest fit, and discuss it there. If it becomes clear that there is enough traffic on the new topic to warrant its own forum, then we will create one.

General Information

Since some people prefer newsgroups, and some people prefer mailing lists, we have created our discussion forums in pairs: both a newsgroup and a mailing list. Each one mirrors its mate: messages sent to one of the newsgroups will also show up in its corresponding mailing list, and vice versa. That way, you get your pick of whether you'd like to read the message via news or mail.

All of the mozilla.org newsgroups are served by the machine news://news.mozilla.org/. However, the groups are also distributed over Usenet: your local news server may have them, too. If your site doesn't carry those groups, and you would like it to, talk to your local news administrator and have them ask your site's upstream feeds for the netscape.public.* hierarchy. If you are a news administrator, you might need our public key to verify our control messages.

We also plan to offer searching of older messages, but for now, the way to get at older messages is to read the old messages present in the newsgroups (which don't currently expire.) Also, Deja News and other search engines archive the Mozilla newsgroups. (Here's a Deja News search to start with.)

How To Subscribe

To read the messages as newsgroups, simply click on the newsgroup names below.

If you choose to subscribe to one of the mailing lists, rather than reading it as news, do this by sending mail to the appropriate -request address. For example, to subscribe to the mailing list called mozilla-foobar@mozilla.org, you would send mail to mozilla-foobar-request@mozilla.org with subscribe in the subject. Likewise, to unsubscribe, you would put unsubscribe in the subject.

Those messages will go to the entire list, and lots and lots of people will think bad things about you. It's a good way to lose friends and embarrass yourself in front of your peers. Always use the -request address for ``subscribe'' and ``unsubscribe'' messages. Just click on one of the mailto: links below, and everything will be fine.

If you have trouble unsubscribing, it is almost certainly because you are now using a different email address than the one with which you subscribed. If you can't work it out, send mail to postmaster@mozilla.org. Do not mail the list.

Ground Rules

There are a few ground rules for participation in these forums. Please respect these rules, and each other.

• Be civil.

  No personal attacks. If you feel the need to flame someone, please do it in private email. Do not feel compelled to defend your honor in public.

• Stay on topic.

  These are generally high-traffic groups, so please pay attention to the topic of your messages, and check that it still relates to the charter of the forum to which you are posting.

• No crossposting.

  It is almost never appropriate to send the same message to two mailing lists or newsgroups. Please don't do it. Or, if you must, make sure you set the Followup-To and Reply-To fields to ensure that replies go only to one, not to both.

  It is absolutely never appropriate to send the same message to two forums when one of those forums has ``general'' in its name.

• No ``advocacy.''

  These groups are for discussions about the Mozilla source code. As such, discussions about which operating system is better, or whether one toolkit is better than another, or whether Microsoft is the root of all evil, are not relevant. There are many forums for discussing such issues on Usenet; please have such discussions there instead of on the Mozilla forums. Might we recommend:

  comp.infosystems.www.advocacy comp.os.linux.advocacy comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy comp.os.os2.advocacy comp.sys.amiga.advocacy comp.sys.be.advocacy

  comp.sys.mac.advocacy comp.unix.advocacy comp.lang.java.advocacy alt.netscape.sucks alt.fan.mozilla gnu.misc.discuss

• Ignore spammers.

  Spam is a blight upon the face of the net. Nobody likes it. However, it is hard to avoid. Despite our best efforts, you will occasionally see spam on the Mozilla mailing lists and newsgroups. If you feel the need to flame the spammer, do not CC the list. Complaining about spam in public increases noise, but not signal. It may make you feel better, but it doesn't help. (For info on fighting spam effectively, check out spam.abuse.net.)

• No anonymous messages.

  If you have something that you are offering for others to read, you should be willing to attach your name to it, and to give people the ability to reply to you privately about it, in case they feel that a public reply would be inappropriate.

  So-called ``address munging'' is frowned upon. Your return address should be replyable. If you want to avoid spam, use mail filters, or don't post. Other alternatives are not welcome here.

• No large attachments.

  Except for the ``patches'' group, sending large attachments is frowned upon; including screen shots, and especially including screen shots of textual dialog boxes. Many people read these messages through slow network connections; try to be respectful of them. If you have a large file that you would like to distribute, put it on a web page and announce the URL instead of attaching it.

• Edit your followups.

  Do not quote the entire content of the message to which you are replying. Include only as much as is necessary for context. Remember that if someone wants to read the original message, they can; it is easily accessible. A good rule of thumb is, don't include more quoted text than new text.

• Post HTML at your own risk.

  Keep in mind that not everyone uses mail or news readers that can easily display HTML messages. Consequently, you will reach a larger audience if you post in plain-text. Many people simply ignore HTML messages, because it takes a nontrivial amount of effort to read them.

• No ``unsubscribe'' messages.

  Unfortunately, this bears repeating. See ``How To Subscribe,'' above.

If you are new to Usenet, you should probably familiarize yourself with the news.announce.newusers FAQs as well.

Topical Forums

These newsgroups and mailing lists relate to the Mozilla project as a whole. (Did you read the Ground Rules above? Please do!)

When new source releases become available, they will be announced here. This is a low-volume, moderated group, for announcements only (not discussions.)

Summaries of reports generated by Mozilla binaries at crash-time will be posted here. This is intended to help developers pinpoint bugs in their code.

This forum is for discussions about the licensing terms of the Mozilla source code. (To see the draft of the Netscape Public License, see http://www.mozilla.org/NPL/.)

Pointers to coverage of the Mozilla project in the online press can be sent to this moderated forum. The moderators will forward them along as appropriate.

Security issues such as specific security problems or ideas for making the code as a whole more secure can be discussed here. Cryptography, however, is not within this group's charter.

This forum is for discussions of any and all user interface issues with Mozilla, including future directions, cross-platform consistency, and so on.

This forum is for discussions about internationalization and localization issues. (Traditionally abbreviated I18N and L10N respectively, since there are 18 letters between the I and the N, and 10 letters between the L and the N.) L10N is the process of adapting software to a specific language and culture; I18N is the infrastructure that allows software to be localized.

This forum is for discussions about documentation: how it should be written, distributed, maintained, and so on.

This forum is for discussions about cryptography, and all the cryptographic issues surrounding the Mozilla source code. (Since the U. S. Government puts severe restrictions on what U. S. citizens and residents can and can't do with crypto code, mozilla.org won't be able to distribute such code; but that doesn't mean we can't talk about it.)

This forum is for discussions about performance of the Mozilla code, and making it perform better.

If you have patches to the Mozilla source code, you can post them here. If you're posting a bug fix, please make sure that the bug system, Bugzilla, also knows about the bug; you also might want to discuss your changes with the appropriate module owner.

If you have trouble compiling the Mozilla source, this is the place to go for assistance. This group is also a good place to talk about ways to improve the build system in the future.

This forum is for announcements of significant or interesting checkins.

This forum is for discussions of future ideas, ranging from the practical to the far out. (Note that ``turn off the <blink> tag'' has already been discussed to death.) Also check out the related Blue Sky column.

This forum is for everything else that doesn't have a more appropriate forum of its own: discussion about any and all aspects of the Mozilla source code, and all the things that we're doing here at mozilla.org. (Did you read the Ground Rules above? Please do!)

Project Forums

These newsgroups and mailing lists relate to specific development efforts within the Mozilla project. Are you planning on organizing a Mozilla-based development project? Do you feel you need a mailing list more focussed than one of the existing lists? Let us know...

This forum is for discussions about Zulu, the standards based calendar client project.

This forum is for announcements of significant or interesting checkins that have been made to Zulu, the standards based calendar client project.

This forum is for discussions about the C SDK, Java SDK, and PerLDAP, which are toolkits for developing LDAP applications.

This forum is for discussions about the Document Object Model (DOM) in Mozilla,

This forum is for discussions about document layout in Mozilla, including the next generation layout engine.

This forum is for announcements of significant or interesting checkins that have been made to the next generation layout engine.

This forum is for discussions about plugins -- external code written to extend Mozilla to provide content-handlers for new MIME types.

This forum is for discussions about RDF (the Resource Description Framework) including Mozilla's Aurora module.

This forum is for developers working on Seamonkey, which is the code name for the version 5.0 release of the Mozilla browser.

This is for discussions about embedding mozilla components such as nglayout, ender, and javascript into software applications.

Discussions about porting the Mozilla browser to or embedding it in small devices belong here.

This forum is for discussions about the Mozilla mail and news reader; see the mail/news pages for more information. This would also be the place to discuss integrating Mozilla with other mail and news systems, and about message composition.

This forum is for discussions about the portable runtime code used by Mozilla.

This forum is for discussions about the Unix and X11 portions of the Mozilla code.

This forum is for announcements of significant or interesting checkins that have been made to the Unix or X11 portions of the Mozilla code.

This forum is for discussions about the Macintosh portions of the Mozilla code.

A number of people are interested in porting Mozilla to OS/2. This forum is for discussions about that effort.

Similarly, a number of people are interested in porting Mozilla to Rhapsody, Apple's new OS descended from NeXTstep. This forum is for discussions about that effort.

Some people are porting Mozilla to BeOS. This forum is for discussions about that effort.

GTK is a Motif-like GUI toolkit for Unix; some people prefer it to Motif for various reasons, and would like to make Mozilla work with GTK. This forum is for discussions about that effort.

Qt is another GUI toolkit, and some folks are interested in a version of Mozilla that uses it. This forum is for discussions about that effort.

This forum is for discussions about Mozilla and Java: both embedding Java runtime environments in Mozilla, and extending Mozilla itself using Java code.

This forum is for discussions about the Cross-Platform Component Object Model (XPCOM) that we're using to purvey and discover interfaces between independently versioned and loaded modules. XPCOM combined with XPIDL also provides scriptability.

This forum is for discussions about the Cross-Platform Front End project. The XPFE provides web browsing and scripting UI and application logic for the New Layout engine.

This forum is for announcements of significant or interesting checkins that have been made to the XPFE.

This forum is for discussions about the Mozilla Editor Component, a.k.a. Composer. The editor provides WYSIWYG HTML editing in a component that can be embedded in HTML and XML.

This forum is for discussions about the Mozilla Networking Library, a.k.a. netlib.

mozilla.org has developed several web-based tools that is used to help manage the code. These tools include Bugzilla (bug tracking), Bonsai (CVS queries), and Tinderbox (continuous automated builds). In the spirit of open software, the source of these tools is freely available, and people may work on them and use them for their own purposes. This forum is for discussions about these tools.

Realtime Chat

There is also a Mozilla IRC channel: #mozilla on the server irc.mozilla.org.

My Netscape

To keep track of all the latest mozilla headlines check out our My Netscape channels.

mozillaZine

mozillaZine is an independent site devoted to news and opinions about mozilla hacking, brought to you by Chris Nelson. Ryuzi Kambe maintains a Japanese translation.