Planet Mozilla policies wiki page

December 4th, 2009Mozilla, Mozilla community, Planet Mozilla, Work 12 Comments

planetmoPlanet Mozilla is a long-standing and incredibly important source for news and information about the Mozilla Project and community. For years, Planet has operated under a slowly evolving set of unwritten-but-generally-understood policies. In an effort to avoid potential misunderstandings and issues, however, The Planet Mozilla team has finally taken the time to write up and post these policies to the Mozilla Wiki:

Planet Mozilla policies

The policies are minimal and relatively straightforward, but if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment here or to email any/all of the Planet Mozilla team (listed on the wiki page).

12 Responses to “Planet Mozilla policies wiki page”

  1. Wladimir Palant Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 9:09 am

    There is one question that I don’t see answered: what kind of content is appropriate for Planet? E.g. some people explicitly syndicate only one category of their blog into Planet. Others are being filtered by Planet software, only posts mentioning Mozilla or Firefox get through. Yet there are blogs that syndicate basically no Mozilla-related content to Planet. Is there some policy on that?

  2. dria Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 9:25 am

    As far as I know the (still) unwritten policy is “whatever a person wishes to send to Planet is appropriate”. I, for example, only syndicate my “Work” feed, while others send everything.

    If the Planet software is set up to filter content out of people’s feeds, it’s something I’m unaware of. I’ll talk to the Planet peers and find out what the situation is there.

    Content-appropriateness is something that needs to be discussed, probably with a larger group (ie: amongst the community as a whole). Planet is getting pretty noisy, which makes it less useful for everyone. Let me chat with the peers and sort something out. Thanks for bringing it up.

  3. Dao Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 9:57 am

    I was afraid that this post would be about a content policy; I’m glad that it’s not. Planet might be getting noisy as more and more people participate, but there doesn’t seem to be a notable amount of entirely inappropriate stuff. I’d keep it as it is rather than potentially overregulating it.

  4. BobChao Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 10:15 am

    Question: is it only accept English feeds?

    Take the planet of Creative Commons, which accept all kinds of languages, for example, I think the CC Planet has more “GLOBAL community” feeling in it. I can understand that things can only go faster if it is in English, since it’s the hub language that most of us can speak. But maybe the planet part could be a little different?

  5. BobChao Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 10:16 am

    forgot to paste the link of CC Planet: http://planet.creativecommons.org/

  6. Smokey Ardisson Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

    Like Dao, I was afraid this was announcing a content(-restriction) policy, and I’m glad to see it’s instead about technical details.

    Before the Planet module existed, there was a problem with the operators of Planet arbitrarily filtering content (without telling anyone) and even silently removing blogs because, in the Planet operators’ opinion, the blog content was irrelevant. That was very bad, and Planet has been much healthier since then, though a bit less interesting.

    Since then, there’s been quite a bit of self-censorship; that is, people who would regularly post interesting non-Mozilla content a few times a month (bsmedberg, preed, bz come to mind) are rarely posting interesting things—granted they’re all posting less now, but those fewer posts are predominantly Mozilla-related—and it’s rather sad. Of course, many new Planet additions since the Planet module came into existence choose to only submit Mozilla-related posts, which is fine, but I don’t think we need to force anyone to do that, either. (I myself have a “software” category syndicated to Planet, because I’m a private person and am not comfortable widely disseminating more personal posts; it unfortunately is the case that recently my “software” category has been all Mozilla-related.)

    Like Dao, I don’t really see any problem with the content posted to Planet currently—aside from the almost total absence of interesting non-Mozilla posts of late, and the repost problem. I find that the “noise” is generated by the incessant reposting of the same thing on multiple blogs (personal blog, hacks, devnews, Mozilla blog) that are all syndicated to Planet, and the occasional spamming of 20 old posts from certain blogs. I’d like the incessant reposting (or perhaps cross-posting, to use an old Usenet term) to stop, or to be limited to links rather than full posts), sure, but there’s nothing wrong with the content of any of those posts, just the fact we’re seeing them 3x.

  7. dria Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 4:22 pm

    Yeah, don’t worry, Planet policies won’t change without ample discussion and feedback.

  8. dria Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 4:27 pm

    @BobChao : I’m actually not sure what the policy is regarding languages, but it appears to be “English only”. It’s a good point you raise, however, but I don’t know how to approach it right now. Let me think about it. Thanks for bringing it up :)

  9. dria Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 4:28 pm

    @Wladimir – I’ve checked with the Planet team, and it appears that there are only two feeds being filtered by the Planet software, and both owners of those feeds are aware of it. If this is not what you understand to be the case, please let me know and I’ll dig into it further.

  10. Jeff Walden Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 6:07 pm

    Seems like this should be posted on the Planet blog, no? (Or at least linked from there.)

  11. BobChao Says:
    December 6th, 2009 at 11:00 am

    Got an idea: how if we auto-detect the language of the feeds, add proper LANG attribute, then control display via CSS? Anyways, hope that this can be approached one day :)

  12. Wladimir Palant Says:
    December 8th, 2009 at 12:19 pm

    @dria: Yes, it is only two people. I was simply slightly surprised recently when Gerv’s not really unrelated post didn’t show up on Planet, until I looked up Planet’s config.ini file. My comment didn’t mean to imply that something needs changing – only that the existing policy could be clearer. And I am fine with “whatever the authors choose to send to Planet” of course.

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