"One Mozilla" Domain Name Policy
davidwboswell
understand our story, we'd like to fix the problem that some community
sites are foo.mozilla.com and some are foo.mozilla.org, and if you go
to the wrong URL for a particular site you get an unhelpful "site not
found" DNS error.
So I'd like to suggest a new policy. Specifically: any publicly-facing
Mozilla site (apart from a small number of exceptions) should be set
up in DNS to be available as both foo.mozilla.org and foo.mozilla.com.
For instance, until a couple of days ago if someone went to
air.mozilla.org they got a DNS error, even though Air Mozilla is a
community service one might have guessed was in ".org". This sort of
situation confuses people and the only reason things were set up this
way is related more to historical accident than a thought-through
policy.
If we are presenting ourselves to the world as "One Mozilla" rather
than as "Foundation .org" and "Corporation .com", then that should be
reflected in the way websites are set up and available.
We filed a bug to fix this for a handful of sites[0], but for next
steps it seems better to have a general policy to refer to instead of
trying to fix this in an ad-hoc fashion.
We think there probably only need to be two exceptions - www.mozilla.org/.com
and support.mozilla.org/.com. If anyone thinks there should be any
others, please comment and say why.
David
Gijs Kruitbosch
> <snip>
> We think there probably only need to be two exceptions - www.mozilla.org/.com
> and support.mozilla.org/.com. If anyone thinks there should be any
> others, please comment and say why.
>
> David
>
> [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=495800
I'd like to comment on those exceptions instead: mozilla.org / .com I
understand. Why support.m.o/c ? Why do they need to be (that) different?
I'd suggest to:
* Make support.m.o point to support.m.c
* Have the latter have a link at the top-right (right above "Ways to get help")
to "Help with other Mozilla software" pointing to www.mozilla.org/support/, (the
current page that support.m.o leads to).
Especially for support I don't think it's a good idea to be that split up: most
people will come for Firefox support (so s.m.o should prominently provide that,
IMHO), and yet I'm not sure why people looking for (eg) Thunderbird support
should never think to visit support.mozilla.com -- they found links to TB on
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/ !
Cheers,
Gijs
davidwboswell
> understand. Why support.m.o/c ? Why do they need to be (that) different?
I don't think either of these exceptions necessarily need to be this
way, but there's two different things going on and this proposed
policy is only addressing one of them.
So for almost all *.mozilla.com sites there is nothing at the
corresponding mozilla.org domain (and vice versa). In these cases, I
think there's no reason not to have the redirects in place and that's
what this policy is addressing.
Where there are different sites currently living on foo.mozilla.com
and foo.mozilla.org, I agree with you that it's worth looking at why
this is the case -- if it's just from historical accident then we can
change it if there is something that works better. I'd rather do that
separately from putting a general policy in place though.
FWIW, I think you have some good ideas for resolving the
support.mozilla.org/.com split and we can probably work something out
by talking with David Tenser and other support stakeholders from other
projects.
David
Gijs Kruitbosch
>> I'd like to comment on those exceptions instead: mozilla.org / .com I
>> understand. Why support.m.o/c ? Why do they need to be (that) different?
>
> Where there are different sites currently living on foo.mozilla.com
> and foo.mozilla.org, I agree with you that it's worth looking at why
> this is the case -- if it's just from historical accident then we can
> change it if there is something that works better. I'd rather do that
> separately from putting a general policy in place though.
>
>
> David
OK, that makes sense. Sorry for interrupting. :-)
~ Gijs
davidwboswell
No problem. I think resolving those things are certainly important
and I'm happy to work with you to put together a proposal to run by
the support groups if you'd like.
David
Axel Hecht
declare one of the two to be the primary site, and redirect from the other.
I personally find it confusing whenever I'm trying to go to
people.mozilla.org/com. It might make it harder to talk about sites,
too. "I'm on foo.mozilla.com", "No, go to foo.mozilla.org", "I don't see
no difference", "Make sure that you ..." etc.
Makes me prefer to see redirects for the non-primary domain.
The other question I have, do we use different certificates for
mozilla.com and mozilla.org?
Axel
Mike Shaver
> I wonder if we should serve the sites from both domains or should declare
> one of the two to be the primary site, and redirect from the other.
Yeah, because:
> The other question I have, do we use different certificates for mozilla.com
> and mozilla.org?
Yes.
Mike
davidwboswell
> declare one of the two to be the primary site, and redirect from the other.
This certainly seems to be worth considering for at least some sites.
Even with the .com/.org redirects in place we are still confusing
things with air.mozilla.com and planet.mozilla.org, for instance. I
don't know enough about the certificate issue though to know what's
possible here.
David
Robert Kaiser
>> I wonder if we should serve the sites from both domains or should
>> declare one of the two to be the primary site, and redirect from the other.
>
> This certainly seems to be worth considering for at least some sites.
> Even with the .com/.org redirects in place we are still confusing
> things with air.mozilla.com and planet.mozilla.org, for instance.
Right, and I think we should, over time, move to having everything that
is not Firefox-specific to have .org as the primary sites. We are a
public-benefit community, no matter if some "Corporation" is
contributing to it, so .org is what most people would expect, I guess.
And open source projects are usually expected to be .org in any case.
Robert Kaiser
fantasai
> I wonder if we should serve the sites from both domains or should
> declare one of the two to be the primary site, and redirect from the other.
I'm strongly in favor of declaring one to be the canonical address and sending
a 301 Permanent Redirect from the other. Having both be valid is confusing,
presents problems with certificates, and also dilutes search results so relevant
pages get duplicated in the results or don't get ranked as highly as they should.
I agree with KaiRo that most should canonicalize to .org. I think the distinction
shouldn't be Firefox vs. other stuff, though, it should be corporate vs. other
stuff. E.g. if people.mozilla is for MozCorp employees only, then it should be
.com, not .org. If support.mozilla is community-driven, it should be .org, not
.com. MozCorp's internal intranet and webmail and directory servers etc. should
continue to be .com. Pretty much everything else should be .org. Imho.
~fantasai
Gervase Markham
> I'm strongly in favor of declaring one to be the canonical address and
> sending
> a 301 Permanent Redirect from the other. Having both be valid is confusing,
> presents problems with certificates, and also dilutes search results so
> relevant
> pages get duplicated in the results or don't get ranked as highly as
> they should.
That makes sense, and appears to be what has been done with
air.mozilla.org. Although currently we have .org 301 redirecting to .com
rather than the other way around.
> I agree with KaiRo that most should canonicalize to .org. I think the
> distinction
> shouldn't be Firefox vs. other stuff, though, it should be corporate vs.
> other
> stuff.
I agree.
Gerv
Mitchell Baker
should be where they are most likely to look for it. That might be a
.org site, or it might be something else - .com, it might be .foo, whatever.
Routing consumers to any particular site because it fits our view of how
we want the world to be is a good path to losing people.
Please note that I haven't suggested any particular content belongs on
any specific domain name. I am suggesting that we need to meet the
intended audience where they are if we want to grow our user base more
deeply into out community.
mitchell
Robert Kaiser
> Content that is aimed at consumers -- people using our products --
> should be where they are most likely to look for it. That might be a
> .org site, or it might be something else - .com, it might be .foo,
> whatever.
Consumers usually enter the brand/product name in a search engine, they
don't care if it's on a .org or .com domain name.
Some enter one of ".com because all commercial products are .com" or
".org because all open source software is .org" but they don't care if
the browser magically switches that suffix while displaying the correct
page, which a recirect does.
> Routing consumers to any particular site because it fits our view of how
> we want the world to be is a good path to losing people.
Why that? If they don't even realize they were rerouted (other than for
three letters magically and almost unnoticably switching around in the
location bar) then I don't see how we lose anyone there.
It's important that consumers get to the right page via search engines
and via entering the domain name they think it could be in the location
bar - the location bar then changes to the "correct" URL, but that
happens in any case.
I haven't heard people complaining yet because "wikipedia.com/foo"
didn't directly show what they were looking for buit was redirected to
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo" (even in two stages).
Robert Kaiser
Gervase Markham
> Content that is aimed at consumers -- people using our products --
> should be where they are most likely to look for it.
Absolutely. And for that (small?) subset of people who guess-type URLs,
this proposal means that whether they are looking in .com or .org,
they'll end up at the site they intended.
> Routing consumers to any particular site because it fits our view of how
> we want the world to be is a good path to losing people.
Sites redirect from one domain name to the other all the time (e.g.
KaiRo's example of Wikipedia). I don't think doing server-side redirects
will cause people to stop visiting the site.
Gerv
Mitchell Baker
I'm thinking of people getting to content from the product, not so much
search. If someone finds something on a help page for a product for
example, we may well want any links to have a look and feel that fits
the page they came from, the product look and feel, etc. The domain
name itself need not --technically -- matter here, but in practice they
are likely to.
mitchell
Mitchell Baker
a second question is what the site looks like *after* the redirect. If
someone is in the middle of using a product -- say thunderbird,
seamonkey or firefox and ends up on a site that looks, feels and is
aimed at a different target audience -- that may not be the best way to
deliver the messages that we're trying to
ml
davidwboswell
> someone is in the middle of using a product -- say thunderbird,
> seamonkey or firefox and ends up on a site that looks, feels and is
> aimed at a different target audience -- that may not be the best way to
> deliver the messages that we're trying to
Definitely -- presenting a coherent story about Mozilla goes beyond
just sorting out domain name issues. Thinking through our domain
names though can give us a good starting point.
No one has objected to updating things so that foo.mozilla.org and
foo.mozilla.com point to the same site, so I suggest making this
official so we can start working with IT. For the exceptions (such as
support.mozilla.org/.com) I'm happy to start talking with the
different site owners about what to do (if anything).
For setting up a primary domain, it sounds like we need to do some
more thinking about what would work best. IMO, we have a few
different stories that we can organize things by (as opposed to
arranging things by legal organization or something else). For
instance, the Firefox download site, the Firefox support site and the
place to install Firefox add-ons, clearly have something in common.
Air Mozilla, the Mozilla wiki, and Planet Mozilla are also parts of a
story about the community.
I think we can move forward with the first piece of this now while we
discuss what works best for the next steps.
David
Chris Ilias
> We think there probably only need to be two exceptions - www.mozilla.org/.com
> and support.mozilla.org/.com. If anyone thinks there should be any
> others, please comment and say why.
I had a look at the data in Urchin for December.
http://www.mozilla.org/support/ had 28,220 hits.
support.mozilla.com had 6,957 referrer instances from
http://www.mozilla.org/support/
That's 24.65%.
I don't know how many of those are coming from support.mozilla.org.
Maybe we can test it out by directing support.mozilla.org to something
like mozilla.org/support/index2 . Then the data for that page would be
almost exclusive to support.mozilla.org.
If we do put a link to Thunderbird/SeaMonkey/etc. support on the
support.mozilla.com front page, there's also the issue of whether or not
users will /find/ the link. Users have a tendency to submit questions in
the first text field they see. Especially when the page is designed to
encourage you to search.
davidwboswell
> Maybe we can test it out by directing support.mozilla.org to something
> like mozilla.org/support/index2 . Then the data for that page would be
> almost exclusive to support.mozilla.org.
Sure, we can test something to help figure this out. Feel free to
open a bug and CC me.
> If we do put a link to Thunderbird/SeaMonkey/etc. support on the
> support.mozilla.com front page, there's also the issue of whether or not
> users will /find/ the link. Users have a tendency to submit questions in
> the first text field they see. Especially when the page is designed to
> encourage you to search.
Good point. There's probably a right way and a wrong way to link to a
range of community support sites.
David