I’ve put together this New Mozilla News Server Information Centre, which should cover any questions people may have about the new news server and newsgroups. It should make for a Happy New Year. 
I’ll be offline, until 2006 [EST].
Month: December 2005
A Gradual Transition
Early next week is when the switch will be turned, to point news.mozilla.org to the Giganews server; but the actual newsgroup transition will happen after that.
Because Giganews contains usenet groups, it already has the netscape.public.mozilla.* hierarchy. When the switch happens, those groups will be available to people accessing the Giganews server via the servername news.mozilla.org. In fact Giganews has had the new groups up and ready since the beginning of October. They’re just not open for access.
After the switch has been made, each new mailing list will be created. There will be an announcement on each mailing list/newsgroup warning subscribers approximately a week in advance of the switch.
Let’s say, for example, you are on the mozilla-qa-general@mozilla.org mailing list, which is bi-directionally mirrored with the newsgroup netscape.public.mozilla.qa.general. When the mozilla-dev-quality@lists.mozilla.org mailing list is created, you will be automatically included on the subscriber list, and Giganews will open the group mozilla.dev.quality for access, at which point subscribers to the netscape.public.mozilla.qa.general newsgroup will have to subscribe manually to mozilla.dev.quality.
If you’d like to see which lists have already been created, you can keep track by visiting https://lists.mozilla.org/.
Right now, netscape.public.mozilla.webtools is the ‘guinea pig’, which will be split into four separate groups. January 4th is the date set for the creation of the mailing lists dev-apps-bugzilla@lists.mozilla.org, dev-apps-webtools@lists.mozilla.org, support-bugzilla@lists.mozilla.org, and support-webtools@lists.mozilla.org, at which point the newsgroups mozilla.dev.apps.bugzilla, mozilla.dev.apps.webtools, mozilla.support.bugzilla, and mozilla.support.webtools will be open for access.
If all goes well with the ‘guinea pig’, the list of available groups will increase shortly thereafter. I’ve been told that after the webtools list is transferred, the rest will happen the following week; but lets all assume a problem or two will arise, and put a buffer week in there.
New Mozilla newsgroups will not go to Usenet
It’s finally public. See:
http://www.mozilla.org/community/giganews-migration.html
It’s been decided, at least initially, to limit propagation to only GigaNews and Google Groups. We have agreements in place with both services to not propagate messages any further. Based on feedback from the community, this may change at some point in the future, but deciding to allow propagation is an irreversible decision so we’re starting out the “safe” way. 🙂
As for the question of when: The first half of January…..2006. 
Pronouncing ‘Ilias’
I came across this podcast, in which someone referencing my site actually tried to pronounce my name (start at about 12:15 into the podcast). There are a few different pronunciations, but the one used in the podcast is definitely wrong.
My parents are from a part of northern Greece which was part of Macedonia. When the Greeks took over, they changed the names of the villages, and the people’s family names, to make them all sound more Greek. I’m not sure of this spelling, but the Macedonian version was ‘ilivi’, with all ‘i’s sounding like long ‘e’s. (eeleevee)
Whenever I visit my relatives in Greece, my last name is pronounced the way. (eeleeas)
“Ilias” is also a first name in Greek, which is probably why the Greek government chose that name as a replacement.
There are other pronunciations of similar names, of people from around that region. For instance, the NHL player Patrik Elias, who pronounces his name the same way, but with an ‘sh’ sound for the ‘s’, comes from the Czech Republic. (eeleeash)
A more common pronunciation is that like Willem Dafoe‘s character in the movie Platoon. (ee-lie-as)
Another way, which I also considered to be correct is shortening and emphasizing the beginning ‘I’ to sound like “ill”. (ill-eeas)
Any of the above would be considered correct, and I may pronounce it any one of those ways, depending on who I’m talking to; but Todd’s pronunciation was definitely wrong.
Incidentally, I used to pronounce ‘Mozilla’ incorrectly, until I saw Code Rush a few years ago. The correct pronunciation is “Moe-zilla”. (from Mosaic Killa)
I guess that’s life in plain text.
Browser and Mailnews FAQs Restructured
Well, I finally did it. A little while ago, I posted about my browser and mailnews FAQs being too big for one page, and that I was considering giving each FAQ item its own page. I contemplated using a content management system, but in the end decided to get rid of template content that I might change, and do it all manually.
I’ve applied these changes to my Netscape 7 Browser FAQ, Netscape 7 Mailnews FAQ, Mozilla Browser FAQ, and Mozilla Mailnews FAQ; so if anyone references those pages, or if you have have a website that contains links to any of the items on those pages, be sure to update your links.
New Mozilla newsgroups on usenet?
Mozilla will have a new newsgroup server, and a new newsgroup hierarchy. One of the biggest decisions in the process is deciding whether or not the newsgroups should be on usenet. For what it is worth, that decision was made some time ago; but since no-one from the Foundation has announced it publicly, I won’t either.
I would love to know what the majority of people want the decision to be. From what I’ve read so far there appears to be no clear preference for usenet provider.
Click here to vote.
Newsgroup subscriptions like bookmarks
I’ve been thinking…
Subscribing to newsgroups is very similar to subscribing to RSS feeds. I use a Firefox extension called Sage to read RSS feeds. Sage contains the list of subscribed feeds within a folder in my Firefox bookmarks. This allows me to:
– sort the list via ‘sort by’.
– re-arrange feeds via drag and drop
– rename feeds
– add separators in the list
These would all be great features for the list of subscribed newsgroups in Thunderbird. [150274, 132247] Instead, Mozilla plugs straight into the RC file. Perhaps, it’s time to put a buffer between two, allowing the program to customize the list.
I’m not a coder, so I don’t know how complicated it would be, but it’s just an idea.
Marking folders/newsgroups read on exit
Every once in a while, someone asks if Mozilla Thunderbird can automatically mark a folder or newsgroup read when you exit that folder or newsgroup. (Why: I don’t know. Automatic marking of all messages as read on exit, is one of the reasons I dislike web-based forums.)
Thunderbird 1.5 can do this, but the setting is hidden. Go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> General, and click on “Config Editor.” In the resulting window, right-click on any of the listed preferences, and select New -> Boolean. The preference name to enter depends:
mailnews.mark_message_read.nntp for Newsgroups
mailnews.mark_message_read.pop3 for POP3 email folders
mailnews.mark_message_read.imap for IMAP email folders
mailnews.mark_message_read.rss for RSS folders
mailnews.mark_message_read.none for folders in “Local Folders”
Set the value to true. Close the Config Editor, and click on “OK” in the Options panel, and you’re done.