Flii, I'm active in the gaming scene as well (as a gamer, not a forum admin or anything). My impression is that gamers are generally NOT interested in Mozilla or Phoenix, they rather use the standard MS stuff, and do an unpatched OS reinstall every couple of weeks because of real or imagined viruses.

Even when I get someone to try Mozilla (for safer websurfing), they'll go back to IE as soons as they stumble to a page that doesn't work immediately in Mozilla, and complain again if someone posts a link to a page that has a virus. Those that continue to use it are often the more decent forumposters.

I don't mind too much though, this forum is better off without the people you describe.

To be honest, most of us have always felt our community for the most part was a great deal more mature than others. I frequent quite a few forums myself, and (not to toot my own horn :) I think ours are working out really well, and people are handling themselves really well.

Jason

i was directed here by a friend after we were talking about spamming, post counts, and post titles for people. in that vein, i have a few things to say, so plz bear with me. ;) i have a lot to say, so don't think you'll make me feel bad by skipping it. lol. those who are interested can read it, those that think i'm full of it can move on to the next post. to each his own, which is part of why these forums are so nice.


i've been a gamer for years, have visited and joined many many gaming forums, been promoted in some of the gaming ladders, was in charge of many aspects of their ladders (including forums), and speaking from experiece, i can honestly say i don't think you can get a much better environment for spam than gaming forums. the people there *only* care about their post count and how much junk they can cram into their sigs. when you visit these forums, you see one word/sentence answers every other post, the ratio of text to graphics is horrendous, and nobody cares enough to fix it. i abhor these types of forums and am glad to have found a serious forum for discussion of one of my favorite programs.

my background being (very briefly - heh) explained, my comments on this forum can be understood a bit more. i think mozillazine does an excellent job of promoting a serious atmosphere that isn't too stuffy or makes people feel dumb about asking questions.

having experienced both the gaming forums and the mozillazine forums, i noticed very key differences:

- zine doesn't allow animated avatars or graphic sigs. this came as quite a shock to me, let me tell you! however, after maybe just 1 day, i came to realize how important this was to a successful forum. the focus here is on what people say, not how cool they make each post look.

- zine actually enforces these rules! wow. i've been trying to get gamer ladder admins to enforce their rules for years, and i was impressed by zine. realizing my background, you have to forgive me for putting up an animated avatar (though not sig!), but my mistake was pointed out to me within hours. very nice.

- zine only had names for posts up to 100. i see now that this is changing, but hopefully the air of seriousness will prevail and new forum members won't be spamming to get their posts up and their "names" as well. i have seen more than one "1-word story" posts on gamer forums, where each person posts 1 word to add to a story. it's spam-heaven and they feel like they are not actually spamming, since that is what they are supposed to be doing. :roll: i'll keep my fingers crossed that this won't induce spam, though i'll be looking at all the 500(whatever)+ names with envy and not a lil bit of temptation. hehe.


i could ramble for hours about this pet peeve of mine (spamming) but i know i've already rambled for far more than your attention span prob is. :-P my apologies.

[quote="Alex Bishop"][quote="djst"]I feel like a looser, because I'm now known as a "Mozilla Cr.... Oh forget it.".[/quote]

You're not a loser any more! Someone (it wasn't me so I guess it was probably Kerz) has updated the rankings. Here's the new ones:

0-4 posts — Mozilla Newbie
5-9 posts — Mozilla Fan
10-19 posts — Mozilla Enthusiast
20-49 posts — Mozilla Fanatic
50-99 posts — Mozilla Addict
100+ posts — Mozilla Afficionado

There are actually some more rankings above that but I wouldn't want to spoil the fun. :-)[/quote]

Well, 500 apparantly is -- Mozilla Devotee

See you back here at 1000 perhaps? :D

[quote="Stefan"][quote="KaiRo"]to e.g. see "this is a coder on that part of moz"...[/quote]

Agreed, but that requires a large ammount of activity by the mods.[/quote]

True, but some of you people really deserve to have a cool title like "Bug Sqasher" or something discriptive like that. I don't remember who it is, but i've seen one that is "Mozilla Organ" or something like that. I could care less about the usage titles.

I've been using Mozilla since the 0.6 release, but I only found MozillaZine forum because there was a link for it in the Phoenix bookmarks. I recognize the names of the Phoenix team, but there are many more who have contributed to the Mozilla project and if they post here, I don't know who they are. I think that it would be neat if they could get some of the recognition that they deserve.

I also think the title "Bug Squasher" is really cool.

[quote="KaiRo"]to e.g. see "this is a coder on that part of moz"...[/quote]

Agreed, but that requires a large ammount of activity by the mods.

[quote="Sander"]a few months from now, complete newbies entering the board will see how the people with large amount of posts and the "best titles" get all the "respect."[/quote]

If you post a lot, it normally doesn't say a lot more than you take quite a bunch of your time to read several forums, and to answer perhaps every silly post. People that take all that time to work on real code, for example, will perhaps be better experts for some things, even though they might have a very small number of posts here. People like me, who normally only post something if they have to say something really meaningful, or a really important question, will likely have a lot fewer posts than people who talk a lot about "why is mozilla so slow, and why does it not work with all those important and good websites that I really love" as well as "mozillaquest writes xyz" topics.

I don't think the number of postings is really a meaningful measure of "what you are" - and that's what those descriptions suggest to be. On the other hand, the number tells who really brings activity to the forums, and that might be a godd thing as well ;-)
Anyway, it would really be a nice thing - also for newbies - to e.g. see "this is a coder on that part of moz", "this is a contributor for some moz-related project", "this is someone who can deal quite good with bug reports and recent regressions, most frequently reported bugs", or "this is some long-time user/tester-only community member", "this is a real newbie to mozilla in general".

[quote="djst"]I feel like a looser, because I'm now known as a "Mozilla Cr.... Oh forget it.". Can you please let me change this to something more meaningful? "Phoenix QA" would feel much better.[/quote]

Yes, it really would be nice if a user - or at least some users, perhaps let them be hand-selected - could change that description himself. I'd really love to write something like "L10n and themes contributor" there, for example...

[quote="Stefan"][quote="tmb"]Don't you think that this will cause unneeded posting?[/quote]
Only among people that think that the ammount of posts in any way reflect on the content on the post. :)[/quote]You'd be surprised how quickly such misconceptions can occur - not at first mind you, but a few months from now, complete newbies entering the board will see how the people with large amount of posts and the "best titles" get all the "respect." And it's a very small step from there to thinking that a cool title equals respect, and that it is thus beneficial to post a lot. Most of that doesn't even have to be conscious, but it's a trap I see these kind of forums fall for again and again. Personally I always recommend limiting titles to just two or three 'levels' 1-5 posts, 5-100, >100 - enough to let people quickly ascertain that someone is really new or been active for a while already, but not enough to provide much incentive to go on spamming-sprees to get even 'better titles'.
Oh well, I'm sure we'll be able to deal with it when that starts happening here. :)

[quote="djst"]I feel like a looser, because I'm now known as a "Mozilla Cr.... Oh forget it.".[/quote]

You're not a loser any more! Someone (it wasn't me so I guess it was probably Kerz) has updated the rankings. Here's the new ones:

0-4 posts — Mozilla Newbie
5-9 posts — Mozilla Fan
10-19 posts — Mozilla Enthusiast
20-49 posts — Mozilla Fanatic
50-99 posts — Mozilla Addict
100+ posts — Mozilla Afficionado

There are actually some more rankings above that but I wouldn't want to spoil the fun. :-)

[quote="Alex Bishop"][quote="Tony"]Under the author name (see left) the new forums show the type of Mozilla user who has posted the message. How is this decided?[/quote]

0-4 posts — Mozilla Newbie
5-9 posts — Mozilla Fan
10-19 posts — Mozilla Enthusiast
20-49 posts — Mozilla Fanatic

... and I don't think anyone's got higher than that, so you can find out the rest for yourself. :-)[/quote]

I feel like a looser, because I'm now known as a "Mozilla Cr.... Oh forget it.". Can you please let me change this to something more meaningful? "Phoenix QA" would feel much better.

LOL I assume there is a new level at about 100 posts
Mozilla Cr.... Oh forget it.

Guess that measn it's time for me to leave this forum and get a life :D

thats post ranks, stuff that you find on every forum, it doesnt reflect anything, only how active you are in the forums, should not to be taken too serious ;)

and if you are really a Mozilla Fanatic, it shouldnt take too long until it's displayed under your username anyway :P

[quote="tny"]Is that AlexH will be a Mozilla Fanatic by lunch time, while those of us who've been using Mozilla since the single-digit milestones (the first Mozilla I used was M7 I think, before Mozilla was really Mozilla) may remaine Mozilla Newbies for quite some time ;-) Not complaining, just find the idea rather funny.[/quote]
Well, M7, relatively speaking, isn't really that far back. There are quite a few of us (even excluding original developers) posting at mozillaZine that were using Mozilla before there were any such thing as nightly or Milestone builds.

And M7 was very much Mozilla. That was summer of '99 and we had been nearly a year of development under the "new roadmap", using nglayout (gecko), the XPFE, XPCOM and XP Connect, etc. We had mail and news running mostly well on the three major platforms. We even had sidebar with customizable panels! ;-) M7 definitely shares more in common with today's Mozilla than M7 shares with Mozilla from the summer before and the old codebase.

As a matter of fact, Jason Kersey (kerz) who manages this site and these forums used to operate a website that pointed to the latest available builds that folks would occasionally compile and post back in the Mozilla classic codebase days. Some of us posting in these forums used to test builds even before kerz's site, MozBin, came into existance (which eventually combined with mozillaZine). I remember when we used to chase after builds at random ftp sites (remember Mike Wynholds and his builds?)

--Asa

ps. I'm just being silly. m7 was a long time ago and if you've been active in the mozilla community since then I understand your finding it curious that the forum would label you as a newbie. post a while. you'll be a fanatic soon :)

True, very true