Discussion Forums/FAQ
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The page may be difficult to navigate, and some information on its subject might be incomplete and/or evolving rapidly.
If you have any questions or ideas, please add them as a new topic on the discussion page.
Contents
Introduction
Mozilla Discussion Forums exist as mailing lists as well as newsgroups. Because NNTP is a different beast than traditional email, there sometimes arise problems or questions on how to use our newsgroup system optimally. Below is the aggregate.
Reporting Questions/Problems
Please file a bug in the Discussion Forums component if you have any problems with news.mozilla.org or Mozilla's Discussion Forums.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I delete a message?
To delete a message from Google Groups, the user that controls the email the message was posted from must submit a request on the Google Groups website. A link is available when viewing the message on the Groups website.
To remove a message from GigaNews and the Mozilla archive, please file a bug in the Discussion Forums component and include the relevant message information.
Why don't you allow binary Attachments?
The are dangerous because file extensions can lie, masking a malicious program as a benign binary file.
What is with the hierarchy (mozilla.dev.*, qa.*, reps.*, support.*)?
Different hierarchies are meant to direct the conversation around specific topics. Dev.* is for development discussion, while Support.* is for support questions from end users. This allows us to have separate conversations for different audiences (mozilla.dev.apps.firefox vs mozilla.support.firefox).
Why don't you propagate NNTP?
For easier control of spam. Most news servers no longer honor cancel messages (message deletion requests) of any sort, so most news servers would wind up with our lower-traffic groups being useless because of the amount of spam on them (you can look at the netscape.public.mozilla.* hierarchy for examples of this - those groups are propagated). By isolating our groups to one or two servers, we can both delete the spam when it happens and more easily block the spammers from posting in the future.
In recent times this has been somewhat hampered by Google's poor handling of spam on their end. We are still able to clean out what's visible on news.mozilla.org (Giganews) however.
Should I mirror news.mozilla.org?
Probably not. If you do, you will confuse the users of your mirror when they try to post questions and nobody using the official servers can see them.
