Planet Mozilla Blog

Greetings,

The Planet Mozilla Module Team has received several complaints today regarding a recent post on Planet. This is not the first time something like this has happened, and we definitely want to understand when people are unhappy with the service that Planet Mozilla offers. We’d like to take this opportunity to clarify our policy and respond to the complaints.

Our policy for the last five years, since the creation of an official Mozilla module for planet.mozilla.org, has been that we do not filter or censor content on Planet. Further, we have encouraged our community to share more than just their Mozilla-related activities on Planet. We desire that Planet reflect the people of Mozilla and not just the work output of the project. It remains a personal choice of those on Planet as to how much to share. People syndicating their blogs to Planet may submit a full blog feed or a curated Mozilla-related feed. We do not intend to change this policy.

The result is content that isn’t always interesting or even “acceptable” to everybody in our community. We feel that the good of sharing the unfiltered (by us) lives of the diverse Mozilla community outweighs the occasional controversial post, and we rely on those syndicating their blogs to Planet to publish to this medium responsibly.

That being said, we have been talking for several years about creating an additional feed that is curated to only contain Mozilla-related topics. We’re not yet sure how we’re going to accomplish that without a lot of manual work due to technical reasons, but as a result of recent feedback from various Mozillians and our desire to make Planet useful to people who do not want to see non-Mozilla content, we will increase our efforts to develop that solution. Bug 733657 tracks this effort.

Finally, we have additional improvements coming to make Planet easier to consume. Following the lead of planet instances at other open source projects — which treat their planets as a collection of people — we are “returning to our roots” by starting the process of separating content generated by individuals from content generated by the project. We’re going to move the project blogs and status posts into their own planet instance and remove them from the main Planet shortly (tracked as bug 733655). Those wishing to follow only Mozilla project content can simply follow that feed and the main planet.mozilla.org service will once again focus on the many individual community voices.

As always, we welcome any and all feedback, either publicly via the newsgroups or blog posts, or privately to planet[@]mozilla[.]org. Please don’t be afraid to contact us if you ever have an issue with something on Planet. As the Mozilla community continues to grow, we all want to work together to ensure everybody has the best experience when reading Planet and that Planet continues to reflect the diversity of views, individuals, and type of content present within our eclectic community.

Sincerely,
The Planet Mozilla Module Team (Robert, Asa, Reed, Paul)

We on the Planet team have spent quite some time figuring out what direction we want to take Planet to make sure it’s the best resource we can give to the community. We’ve taken polls, discussed amongst ourselves and observed quite a bit. We’re now going to take some actions we feel will serve the community best.

In addition to the existing criteria of having “some demonstrated involvement with the Mozilla project or community” we’re going to limit inclusion to Planet Mozilla to individuals both going forward and retroactively. To expand on that the following criteria will be our guide:

• Being a singular human, or humanoid (we’re robot friendly) with a singular name behind the blog.
• An occasional “Guest post” is perfectly fine, so is bragging about your project, announcing what you and your team is working on. Planet is about discussion and sharing. We just want to get away from the press release style posts seen on product blogs. Planet is about the people and the great work they do, not the products directly (indirectly, absolutely).
• Notable exceptions may be made for the Mozilla blog, and Planet blog. These would be very rare in nature for overarching things. The Planet team will be responsible for making this decision when
  necessary.

We aren’t in the business of censoring content. We just want people, discussion, insight and value to be the focus, not team/product speak and announcements. There is a place for those other things, but planet isn’t it. We’ll be looking very closely at creating a planet for teams/groups/announcements and would love feedback on the idea.

This puts us in line with planet aggregators for other projects/communities.

We’ll be making this change in the upcoming weeks. We just wanted to do this in a transparent and clear manner. There will be some grey area here and the planet team will address those cases individually as warranted.

The Planet team is always open to feedback. We’re dedicated to facilitating discussion and sharing in the community. We’re just starting to discuss other things we can do to help Planet Mozilla scale to the larger community and encourage more great discussion.

- raccettura (on behalf of Planet team)

To keep with the times the Planet Team has slightly tweaked our policies regarding notification of blog owners if their blog is removed to allow for things other than filing bugs since not everyone is reading bugmail, especially if they leave the project. To quote the changed item:

Blogs can be pulled from Planet for poor availability (generally over a week of being unavailable). 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.).

- raccettura on behalf of Team Planet Mozilla

After listening to multiple complaints from stuart and LpSolit about Planet Mozilla messing up the titles of their posts, I finally filed a bug to get the cron job that creates the planet page and feed moved to a box that has Python 2.5.x installed.

What does this mean? Well, I’ve been stuck with using Python 2.4 for a while, and since Sam Ruby‘s Planet Venus doesn’t seem to work well with older Python versions anymore, I couldn’t upgrade Planet Mozilla’s code until the code could be run under Python 2.5. Thanks to justdave, the backend code for Planet Mozilla has been successfully moved earlier tonight with little downtime (you didn’t even notice, I bet!) to a server with Python 2.5. I’ve also upgraded it to the latest code from the Planet Venus repository, and everything seems to be working well.

I haven’t looked into any new features that could possibly be added, so this was mostly just a bug fix upgrade, but I will be checking to see if there’s anything new we could do. If anybody knows of something we could do to improve Planet Mozilla, please let me know. If anybody sees anything odd or wrong with Planet Mozilla after this upgrade, please file a bug, and I’ll do my best to fix the issue asap. :)

Thanks again to justdave for the help with the upgrade!

We’re getting ready to move to a new version of the software that makes Planet Mozilla happen. You can see (and help us test) the new version at http://planet.mozilla.org/venus/. If you see anything that looks wrong, please let us know in the comments. Thanks.

- Asa (on behalf of the p.m.o team)

If you were providing a comprehensive feed and counting on the filters in place at Planet Mozilla, please let me know because we’re not going to be filtering any more. Thanks.

- A (on behalf of the Planet Mozilla team)