Development newbies forum?

[Alex Bishop]

So any development question which is *not* about themes or extension would still be off-topic there and I guess not many would be motivated to post something related to general Mozilla development in there. I am not sure myself how many people would really *want* to discuss Mozilla development here at Mozillazine, but IMO anything that would motivate people to get into contributing (instead of just whining) would be good.

I think the best place for general development questions is the netscape.public.mozilla.* newsgroups. They were created for developer discussion and, in theroy, the developers should hang out there.

I was therefore thinking of something more in the direction of "Mozilla Extensions and Development" (or vice versa) as the title and "...extension and general Mozilla development" in the description. Having these two combinded could also provide a forum to help people decide whether they want to go for a patch or implement it in an extension first, whether something can be take from an extension into the Mozilla tree and so on.

Don't really want to change the purpose of the Extensions forums. Don't really want to create any new forums either (we've got 20!). We'll just see how it all pans out for the moment. Everything will be reviewed in good time.

[Stefan]

Don't really want to create any new forums either (we've got 20!).

I'm not arguing for or against making more forums in this specific case, but I don't understand that argument.

I mod other forums of which one has 70+ subsections, and that works just fine. So I don't see 20 forums as exceptional in any way.
10, 20 or 30 makes no difference to me.
The judgment IMO should rather be if there is a need / desired target for a specific forum, then how many other forums there are already.

Or is there some other reason behind it, like database preformance or something?

[se-]

I think a resource site with beginner-guides / tutorials / things like that would be more usefull than just another discussion forum. I think people who are unexperienced and shy won't post / ask in the newsgroups and in the discussion forums as well.

[Alex Bishop]

Don't really want to create any new forums either (we've got 20!).

I'm not arguing for or against making more forums in this specific case, but I don't understand that argument.

I mod other forums of which one has 70+ subsections, and that works just fine. So I don't see 20 forums as exceptional in any way.
10, 20 or 30 makes no difference to me.
The judgment IMO should rather be if there is a need / desired target for a specific forum, then how many other forums there are already.

Or is there some other reason behind it, like database preformance or something?

It's more of a we-don't-really-want-to-create-loads-of-forums-on-a-whim reason. That doesn't mean there won't ever be new forums. It's just that the current set have only been up for a fortnight and we don't really want to rush in and create loads more right now.

I'm sure lots of sites have 70+ forums but remember that MozillaZine is actually a rather small site. Plus, I wouldn't want to read 70+ forums worth of posts every day.