The netscape.public.mozilla.* news hierarchy needs renaming as detailed at the above URL. The new names were arrived at through community consultation. This is urgent for several reasons, primarily that the Netscape == Mozilla confusion the names cause lead to loads of misplaced, annoying and unwanted posts. Gerv

I'd like to use this opportuity to move to Mailman based mailing lists, running from tegu.mozilla.org (aka lists.mozilla.org). Marking 62369 dependent. ETA for these is end of January/early February.

> ETA for these is end of January/early February. Too late. We are flooded with offtopic posts.

Too bad. Our change control starts in a week or so and we have no way making this happen before it. We need to: a) register new hierarchy, distribute pgp keys etc. This will take at least a week to propagate. b) we want to tie this to our new news architecture in which deployment starts in January (current news.mozilla.org is only SS20 and we don't want to use it much longer). Hardware is ordered. c) I want to get rid of SmartList and convert to Mailman (with LDAP patches later) d) Holidays are upon us. News admin is going to sabattical, too.

> Our change control starts in a week Can't you postpose the move to new servers by 2 weeks or so?

The mailing list for each of the mozilla newsgroups should also as part of the subscription process notify the subscriber that 'This is not a mailing list for the support or discussion of any Netscape or third party product. Support for products should be given by the distributors of those products.' Or similar wording.

Simon: that will be very easy in Mailman. Ben: move to new servers is postponed already quite a long time. I think we had things drafted 6 months ago and finally we are getting those. They'll come unrelated to this ticket and it just makes more sense to start these in the new architecture and not do twice the work.

assigining to marki

marki, risto - what news, here? Are we still expecting to complete this by the end of January, or has that date slipped? Gerv

I'll let Markus/Mark answer more detailed but I think we have servers waiting for installations.

Lads, any chance of another status update? How are your shiny new servers? :-) Gerv

mbaur says the machine has arrived but we're waiting on the raid array.

Moving to nobody until we have better picture of where we'll be going with mozilla.org support by IC.

Whoa there! Can someone please explain what's going on here? A lot of people have been waiting on a resolution for this problem for several months now, and I thought we were close to one. What are these doubts about Netscape IS supporting mozilla.org? Gerv

Moving to nobody is a shock! Please explain!

Don't panic! I moved _all_ server operations tickets to nobody, not just this. That's because we have some personnel issues and until we really know who will do what I decided to throw everything to nobody until we can reassing them. We are not going anywhere or stopping mozilla.org support. In fact, we're working on models that might even increase the support levels we can offer to mozilla.org. And wasn't this bug assigned to marki? That's not much better than nobody because he just went to sabattical. Btw, there is no "Netscape IS". Haven't been for 2 years or so. It's AOL Internal Computing.

*** Bug 59398 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

bug 59398 contains good info about steps that will have to be done to accomplish this... when closing this bug please double-check back there because that one has more details (despite dawn's claim when closing that one as a duplicate of this one)

Risto - can you give us any idea when this bug will come out of limbo? In November we asked for this to be done, and it was postponed for two months on the basis that it would be easy to do when getting a new server. It's now three months later, and no new server or newsgroups. Can someone please run the "create newsgroup" script on news.mozilla.org seventy times? Please? Gerv

gerv, can you attach a file with the current suggestion? (Discussion about it on the newsgroup, announced here, please.)

The final list is at the URL given in this bug. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "(Discussion about it on the newsgroup, announced here, please.)" I am deeply against reopening the discussion on the newsgroups, because we'll be here for another two months. Everyone seemed happy with the document as it is (it hasn't changed for a while.) Gerv

> The final list is at the URL given in this bug. Oh, didn't see that, sorry. > I am deeply against reopening the discussion on the newsgroups I just meant that *if* somebody objects (which usually is the case), he shouldn't do it *here*.

risto (or endico): Any chance of an update? Is the IS support for mozilla.org situation now more clear (one month on)? What's up with this nice new machine? Is there someone "officially responsible" or is this bug still assigned to nobody? Gerv

the IS situation sucks just as much as ever. dont' expect that to change in the near future.

So, what are we going to do with this bug?

Dawn: what are the chances of getting the new groups created on the old server? We might not get the fancy features we wanted, but we'd get the name change and reorganisation wins. Gerv

The old server is going away at the end of the month. This is a hard deadline.

Does this mean that setting up a new one is also a hard deadline, or does it mean that we will be without news in 11 days? Gerv

You'll be without news at the end of the month - just kidding! I'm trying my best to have the new server ready ASAP.

IC can own this.

mbaur: Thanks for taking this on :-) Any chance of giving us some idea as to when it might happen? This has been eagerly awaited by many people since November :-) Gerv

I don't see how 62369 would block this. It's unrelated to news rearchitecture.

Adding more bugs this is blocking.

This is thus a tracking bug.

I can own projects.

This depends on SIR #21491 (opened 03/21/01) being completed.

New server is supposedly in place, we also have contractors helping us. We hope to get this completed 7/15/2001.

I can confirm that this didn't happen two days ago. What are the current plans?

i am told that the new machine was just recently placed in the rack and now we're waiting for the os to be installed which will of course happen RSN. The new eta is "Don't Hold Your Breath". In the mean time, I figured out how to cancel articles (it can only be done from inside the netscape firewall) and i've been deleting a bunch of stuff one at a time by hand. Suboptimal, but better than nothing.

The latest on the new server is: We're currently trying to figure out a bug in the latest inn release (2.3.2) that causes problems with the history db.

Are you still working on the inn bug, or has the status of this bug changed? Is there an ETA?

Last comment in this bug was three months ago, and Andreas' question was never answered. Is there an ETA for this?

Moving tickets to Ray.

Here is your latest in the periodic saga of "is there an ETA on this?" requests. Not that I have any expectation of an answer, or that the ETA will *ever* become less than a constant N months away. But it can't hurt to keep poking, especially since nobody seems to be listening anyway.

We're still watching... just having trouble executing. Markus, What should we do with this?

News -> Markus.

Please, guys, can you give us an ETA on this? Certain individuals in n.p.m.general is now using the fact the newsgroups still have "netscape." on them as part of some obscure "AOL Conspiracy Theory" or something... it's very frustrating. We really need this name change. At least give us an ETA, is that really too much to ask?

Mass changing IC's ticket to reflect current situation. mozilla.org, AOL employees: If you want IC to look at issues reported in bugzilla, please open a Helpdesk ticket and ask it to be routed to AOL R1 Server Operations. We currently have no way to handle comprehensive problem resolution through bugzilla. This is not a change in the way we are supporting mozilla.org - we are still supporting you on the level as before. IC's support is based on Helpdesk ticket system - not bugzilla which only few hard-core people are looking at. Also, projects are handled elsewhere - not in bugzilla. If you have projects you need us to deliver please feel free to contact me directly. Summa summarum: tickets -> Helpdesk Project initiations -> RKotalampi@aol.com

endico - could you please open a Helpdesk ticket for this issue, as Risto requests? Thank you. Gerv

A bit of statistic: There were 75 posts to n.p.m.mail-news at May 9th (CET). Not a *single one* of them was by a developer about Mozilla development. That makes 100% (!) noise. See <http://groups.google.de/groups?hl=de&selm=3CDB4940.7080004%40beonex.com> or <news://www.mozilla.org/3CDB4940.7080004@beonex.com> for more info.

Any news? Has a helpdesk ticket been opened?

It's been over three months. Can no one here answer Jonas' question?

Look like this is never going to happen, I suggest WONTFIX so people can start thinking on alternate solutions.

Why would WONTFIX be the right solution? Everyone wants this bug fixed; and we have not given up hope of fixing it eventually. If you have alternate ideas in the mean time, run them past staff@mozilla.org . Gerv

We should set severity to blocker and add `crash', `hang', `dataloss', `regression', and `topperf' keywords :p

Daniel: Don't bother. The news admin is far too busy playing Freecell.

Garth, Daniel: What the heck is 'Freecell'? And why are you interrupting my Klondike game with accusations like that?

Does mozilla.org really need its own news server? The netscape.public.mozilla.* groups are already distributed by many ISPs and if the new groups were created without limitations on distribution, I expect they would too. Instead of waiting for AOL, all that is needed is for an organisation to volunteer to host the new groups and from there they will spread to the rest of the world? At least that how I understand the principle of Usenet.

Does anyone know what is going on with this?

We discussed this at today's staff meeting. The situation is that we are currently still using Netscape's news server. We have hardware for our own news server, but no resources to spare to set it up, create the new groups, work out a transition plan and so on. This bug would be far more likely to happen if an experienced news server admin stepped forward and was able to commit to doing that work for us, and looking after the server going forward. (This is really bug 215294). So there's a challenge for anyone who wants to see this happen. :-| Gerv

Some feedback: I recently witnessed a similar transition of one set of forums to a re-named set of forums with the same audience as the originals. Even though all the posts were migrated from old to new, the net result was a huge drop in participation levels. Six months later, participation is just now slowly building up again. I therefore hope this transition is planned carefully. There's more to it than just the technical legwork - we want to both retain and expand existing communities. The proposed group list doesn't provide forums for app developers, or for newbies. The tone in existing n.p.m. newsgroups has mostly been suitable for advanced core developers only. Who are we trying to attract? The proposed list also doesn't say where these newsgroups intend to sit with respect to USENET or with respect to privately run forums such as those at XULplanet. There's no point duplicating those services unless the intent is to directly compete. Just what kind of service/community are these newsgroups to offer? Is it desireable that xulplanet forums thrive or die? This re-org should be more than just a series of tech steps, it should be designed to grow community access to mozilla. - N.

This was a tracking bug. All the blockers have been resolved, so this is now resolved as well.