Retiring this newsgroup, moving to Discourse

[John Whitlock]

Hi Location fans!

First, the news. I'm deprecating this mailing list (a.k.a. mozilla.dev.geolocation). The discussion is moving to several places, based on your intent:

* Discourse for general discussion of location topics - https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/location/506
* GitHub issues and Bugzilla, to report bugs:
- https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea/issues for the Mozilla Location Service (MLS)
- https://github.com/mozilla/mozstumbler for MozStumbler
- https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components/issues for the Location component / service in Firefox for Android
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Core&component=DOM%3A%20Geolocation for the Geolocation feature in Firefox
* Element for location chat - https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#location:mozilla.org

I'm John Whitlock, a developer at Mozilla on the Service Engineering team working on the Mozilla Location Service (MLS). I've been part of the effort (with Will Kahn-Greene) to refresh the service code and infrastructure, to get it up to current standards. Will has moved on to other projects.

I've recently gotten access to administration of the newsgroup, and it is a bit of a mess. Like many older newsgroups, the majority of the new messages are spam. There is also a huge backlog of pending messages, some relevant to Location, but again a lot of spam.

Rather than continue with the newsgroup, I'd like to follow the path of other projects at Mozilla, and move to Discourse for discussion. Discourse requires account registration, but posting to this newsgroup required subscribing, so I hope that is not an outsized burden. There are more moderators to share the load on Discourse, and I find it easier to find older discussions, to tune my subscriptions and alerts, and to see the other discussions around Mozilla initiatives. I hope you see this as an upgrade.

I plan to quickly respond to posts on Discourse. I'm able to answer most questions about MLS, since I'm actively working on that service. I can answer almost no questions about MozStumbler, since I'm not working on it (and I can't run the app myself). I can answer a few questions about location and the geolocation API in Firefox, or redirect you to someone who knows more than me.

I hope to get through the newsgroup backlog before the end of the year. This may involve posting pending posts, some from more than a year ago, or emailing the poster to re-post on Discourse. Once I've gotten through the backlog, I plan to turn up the admin knobs to automatically reject new posts.

Thanks for following mozilla.dev.geolocation, and I hope you'll follow the Location topic on Discourse!

John Whitlock
Software Engineer, Mozilla