The Big Discourse Tidy Up!

Mozillians
1

Hi everyone!

As you may have noticed, this Discourse instance is looking a little neglected. There has been so much old unused content relating to old projects, it has been harder to find new and information. At the time it was set up, it was designed to be all things for all people, but in recent years, connect.mozilla.org has picked up more of a user focus and the contributor population at Mozilla has been a bit forgotten.

With the support of Mozilla staff I have been looking at how we can turn this around. The first part is tidying up Discourse. I have already fixed the Mozilla branding for dark themes on desktop and mobile, but there is so much more to do and the first part of that is…

The Big Discourse Tidy Up!

I did initially look at trying to move old content to an archive area. However, where lots of nested levels were set in the past, it is now very difficult or impossible to move them. The archive is overflowing a bit and we have many areas that have not been looked at in…years.

So we are going to delete a lot of old content in 3 weeks time on the 16th February 2026

The following topics are going to be deleted:

Community Ops
Linux
Community Portal
Meta
Open Policy & Advocacy
Archive IAM
Communities
Mozilla Communities Web Services
Accessibility
Reps
Quality Assurance
Side View
B2G OS
Storage & Syncing
WoMoz

Connected Devices
Campus Clubs
Mozilla Nativo
playground
Tracking Protection

people.mozilla
Firefox Student Ambassadors
Mozilla IT
Speaking
Participation Systems
Open Source Student Network
Mixed Reality
Lounge
L10n Women & Non Binary
Group Registration Pilot
Community Participation Guidelines
Archive
Pontoon
Everything in the Archives

This is a big list and I admit is a little scary, but the benefits of clearing this out are significant. It is really important to note that removing a forum is no ill will towards a project or team. Awesome and hardworking Mozillians have been involved in these projects and their efforts are very much appreciated.

What we will be left with will be:

Mozillians - A town square for all contributors
Add-ons - An establish community that works well
Common Voice - As above
MDN - for the MDN community
Firefox Development - for contributors contributing code to the Firefox codebase
Developer Tools - for contributors working on Dev Tools
Developer Community - for web devs needing a hand
Firefox for Android - for contributors working on Firefox for Android Thunderbird - for Thunderbird contributors
Fluent
Localization - for our awesome L10n teams
Firefox Tooling Announcements - all the news on all the build tools
Firefox Nightly
SpiderMonkey
Deepspeach (may be brought out of the Archive and kept as a closed forum)

There may be a little more tidying up, but this is the core of what we will have. I believe that this list is fair and has been subject to staff scrutiny over the past week or so.

I would now like to give YOU an opportunity to provide feedback. Please reply in this thread with any thoughts before 16th February. After this date we will start removing content.

This cleanup is only the first (and very much needed) stage. I have already been working on a few little things that I think you are really going to like, but going forwards this will be a space for people contributing to Mozilla. User content will be more connect.mozilla.org and support questions will be better handled over at support.mozilla.org.

6 Likes
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Thank you for doing this needed clean up, @plwt :raising_hands:

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Thanks for tackling this, Paul. I definitely agree that some cleanup is in order, it’s getting a bit outdated and hard to see what is active at first glance. For example just before “Reps” showed up in the sidebar, even though Reps has been decommissioned a while ago, quite confusing. Looking through the categories to keep, it seems to be reasonable.

Let’s double check that this won’t take down Mozilla - Community Portal. Though that integration might already be disabled anyway? I actually don’t remember.

Why is that?

I don’t think I am a fan of just purging content that gives good historical context on contributions in the past. I do acknowledge the difficulties regarding nested levels though. Looking through the categories to be deleted, I think some could easily be kept in an archive. These do not have any sub category and could be moved as-is:

  • Community Ops

  • Linux

  • Meta

  • Open Policy & Advocacy

  • Archive IAM

  • Accessibility

  • people.mozilla

  • Mixed Reality

  • Pontoon

The following categories with subcategories wouldn’t lose much context if they got moved into one category and then be archived:

  • Meta
  • Mozilla Communities Web Services
  • Reps
  • WoMoz

Where it gets tricky is “Community Portal” and “Communities”. I see in the current archive there was previously an approach with naming the category including subcategories as well, such as “Community Building - Pathways Working Group”. Not a bad approach per se.

The following categories I couldn’t find, so couldn’t check if they have subcategories (I do wonder why I am not seeing those though..):

  • Quality Assurance
  • Side View
  • B2G OS
  • Storage & Syncing
  • Connected Devices
  • Campus Clubs
  • Mozilla Nativo
  • Tracking Protection
  • Firefox Student Ambassadors
  • Mozilla IT
  • Speaking
  • Participation Systems
  • Open Source Student Network
  • Lounge
  • L10n Women & Non Binary
  • Group Registration Pilot
  • Community Participation Guidelines

Why is that an issue? It is clearly marked as archive.

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I can come up with many example posts that should be preserved within those categories, such as contributors’ reports and event sharing. Removing them means we killed part of their work result and turned that time into nil.

But I do understand that, in the end, the internet is not going to remember anything, like all the pre-Web 3.0 platforms, and the only way is to let go of them.

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Hi there lovely people!

You might want to take a look at some tools over here that allow for historical archive preservation:

It would be great if that happens since some of us are still linking some great work, projects and conversations that happened in the past decade here that are still an example and inspiration for many present and future community projects :wink:

Cheers.

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When I try to move some of those threads, Discourse will not let me as there are nested folders that have gone missing and I am blocked from moving them. We literally cannot move them to an archive folder until we can find the unknown missing sub folders that were created.

(nested forums in Discourse is not a great idea - major learning point)

What is in the archive itself is a fair point, but it we struggle to move data to it, how useful or complete an archive is it. I am also slightly fearful that some of the forums there may still be available and become a home for content we do not want to see here.

Moving forums to the archive is the bigger problem.

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Interesting. Might be worth starting a topic at https://meta.discourse.org/ to see if someone can help locate those? Or is @leo still active here?

As long as the threads are actually archived (and not just moved to a category called “Archive”), that should not happen and I wouldn’t base decisions on a potential bug with the overall Discourse software.

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The Linux section still has a little activity and is not related to a past dead project, I would keep it.

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@mkohler When I try to move (for example) Reps to the archive area, I get a message:

image
image767Ă—171 6.89 KB

This is a long standing issue - Trying to move a category but getting "You can't nest a subcategory under another." error - Support - Discourse Meta

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Okay, lets keep it, but the activity in there appears to be better supported in SUMO (where more eyes might see it).

The aim of this tidy up is to create a space for contributors and part of that is pointing feedback at c.m.o and support at SUMO.

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Yes, the Reps category for sure has 2 sub categories with one post each. In my previous post I listed a few categories where I think that everything could be moved into the main category and then we should be able to move it to the archive.

I meant that we could create a topic to ask about how to locate those. For the Reps category it’s clear. But you seem to have found some that should be moveable but are not? Or do I misunderstand and you don’t actually see the sub categories in the Reps category?