Planet Mozilla

Everything you ever wanted to know about Planet Mozilla, and then some.

Planet Mozilla is a long-standing and incredibly valuable resource for the Mozilla Community. As our community has grown and number of projects increased, we (the Planet peers) have decided codify some of our previously-unwritten-but-generally-understood policies, and clarify the reasoning behind them.

This document was last updated in November, 2017.

Being added to Planet Mozilla

If you would like your blog syndicated on Planet Mozilla, please file a bug requesting that we do so. The bug three things:

1. Your blog's URL.
2. A URL for a tagged feed you want included. Though not all feeds have tags, a tag is required for newly-added feeds. Please see the Tagged Feeds section for more information.
3. A short bio that we can use to announce your addition on the Planet Mozilla weblog
4. Some assurance that you meet the requirements below.

Approvals

You must have some demonstrated, current involvement with the Mozilla project or community in order to be included on Planet Mozilla. This will be evaluated per-addition by members of the Planet team; Module owner approval is not required, but may of course be sought in the event of disagreement.

Planet is a community of people, not products, services or bits. Each blog must be the work of an individual community member, and syndicated articles should (generally) be tagged for Planet inclusion. Participants are obviously free to blog about what they are working on, but we want to keep planet for the people, though exceptions will be made by the Planet team (Mozilla Blog, Planet blog, Mozilla team blogs, for example).

If there are any questions that need to be answered prior to approval, they will be posted in the bug -- please remember to check your bug sporadically until it is closed and resolved.

Requesting feed changes

If you move your blog or the feed URL changes for whatever reason, you can request that be updated on Planet without a second round of approvals. You simply need to file a bug requesting the change.

Being removed from Planet Mozilla

There are a number of reasons that a feed can be removed from Planet Mozilla:

1. It may be removed if the Planet team determines it violates the spirit of the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines or Conditions of Use.
2. The person who owns the feed files a bug to request its removal. Please note that unless there are clearly unusual circumstances no one else can request a blog be removed. Any requests for removal must come from or be confirmed by the blog owner.
3. The Planet team may remove feeds at their discretion (temporarily or permanently) for various reasons, including spam or illegal activities.
4. Blogs may be pulled from Planet for poor availability; The blog owner will be notified by a bug being filed, email, IRC, IM, or other communication means identifying the feed so that they can either fix their issue and be re-included or choose to be removed from Planet permanently. When removing a blog if a bug isn't filed, a commit message will indicate the action taken (notified on IRC, Twitter, etc.).

Having a blog post removed from Planet

Individual posts can be removed from Planet if absolutely necessary, such as in rare instances when something private has been accidentally posted. The original poster must file a bug to request the removal, and should contact a peer directly in cases of emergency. Posts will only be removed if the original post has also been removed from the source blog, and due to the nature of syndicated feeds any private information such as passwords should be assumed to have been circulated regardless of how quickly the Planet team responds.

Tagged Feeds

Because of its large, diverse and global audience, Planet is a powerful tool to amplify the voices of its participants. With that in mind, a tagged feed is intended to act as a trigger guard, indicating that an article's inclusion on Planet is deliberate. This should not be interpreted as a promise that the article in question is Mozilla-related, only that it is intended for the Planet audience.

As a courtesy to that audience, we ask (but do not mandate) that articles on challenging, non-Mozilla topics have a brief summary at the beginning, outlining the contents.

Some blog hosts - most notably Medium - do not support tagged feeds; if you are in the process of deciding where to host your blog, please keep this requirement in mind. On Medium, the workaround for this is to create a publication dedicated to yourself and ask Planet to syndicate tagged articles from that publication. Note that the standard syndication on Medium includes all your Medium activity, not just your written articles, which is almost certainly not what you - or the larger Planet audience - want.

Planet Mozilla Team

• Module owner:
  • [empty]
• Peers:
  • Asa Dotzler ("asa", asa-AT-mozilla.org)

(please use planet-AT-mozilla.org to contact the entire team)

Working docs

• Planet Mozilla/Channels