Consolidating the MDN public mailing lists (part 1: Yes or No?)

[Janet Swisher]

Request for community feedback:

Should we consolidate all the (English-language) MDN public mailing
lists into one list or forum? (This idea was proposed when the MDN
content team met in San Francisco in early December.)

The existing mailing lists are:

* dev...@lists.mozilla.org: for discussions about MDN content
* dev...@lists.mozilla.org: for discussions about MDN platform
development
* m...@lists.mozilla.org: for planning (including sprint planning) and
high-level discussions that cut across or impact both content and
development

Reasons for consolidating these lists include:

* The existing mailing lists are confusingly named, which makes it
hard for potential/new community members to figure out which one(s)
they should subscribe to, or post messages to.
* People who are deeply involved in MDN usually subscribe to all 3
lists anyway, and also don't always remember which topics they
should post to which list.
* The existing mailing lists are all pretty low in traffic, and
therefore don't merit being separate lists.

Other considerations of consolidating these lists (that I can think of)
include:

* If people have to resubscribe to a consolidated list, we might lose
a lot of passive members. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in my
opinion, if it means we end up with a more committed and active (if
smaller) subscriber base.
* Whether to consolidate is a separate question from what format the
consolidated list would take. I will start a separate thread (part
2) for that question, pending the outcome of this thread. Please
leave that question aside from this thread unless it's central to
your opinion (for example, "I'm only in favor if I can continue to
use X to read the discussions").

Opinions? Considerations I haven't thought of?


--

Janet Swisher <mailto:jREMOVE...@mozilla.com>
Mozilla Developer Network <https://developer.mozilla.org>
Community Strategist

[Anthony Maton]

Hello,

I think it’s a great idea.

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[Sebastian Zartner]

Consolidating them would be ok for me for the reasons you mention.
Non-the-less there are a few reasons to keep them separated:

* You can easily filter messages by type (content / platform / high-level).
* They cover different aspects of MDN.
* Avoid breaking mailing threads.

Another option would be to rename the lists (and provide better
descriptions for them) to distinguish them better, like
mdn-c...@lists.mozilla.org, mdn-pl...@lists.mozilla.org,
mdn-g...@lists.mozilla.org.

Also, should mdn-se...@lists.mozilla.org be merged, too?
And what about the non-English mailing lists dev-m...@lists.mozilla.org,
dev-m...@lists.mozilla.org and dev-m...@lists.mozilla.org? They are
obviously unmaintained, abandoned and flooded with spam. So, I vote for
closing them at the same time we're changing the other lists.

Sebastian

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[John Whitlock]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 3:27 PM, Janet Swisher <jswi...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> Request for community feedback:
>
> Should we consolidate all the (English-language) MDN public mailing lists
> into one list or forum? (This idea was proposed when the MDN content team
> met in San Francisco in early December.)

+1, combine the lists into one list. Feel free to filter on my email if
you want to ignore Kuma developer discussions.

John

[Chris Mills]

+1 also. I’d be happy with this, for exactly the reasons stated so far.

Chris Mills
Senior tech writer || Mozilla
developer.mozilla.org || MDN
cmi...@mozilla.com || @chrisdavidmills

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