New infrastructure!
Two weeks ago we migrated discourse.mozilla.org’s infrastructure over to Mozilla IT.
Not much has changed from the user-facing perspective (with one notable exception, explained below), but the new infrastructure brings many stability and monitoring improvements. Discourse should now be able to scale much better in high traffic situations, and major bugs should be noticed much quicker.
Huge thanks to @alberto, who did most of this migration work!
New email infrastructure
We also took this opportunity to revamp how we deliver emails to Discourse.
Most of this infrastructure was a relic of our community led days, so notifications came from an @mozilla-community.org address, and Discourse polled a shared inbox at intervals, on which we manually had to set up aliases for each category.
Now Discourse sends/receives from @discourse.mozilla.org and incoming email is processed immediately (rather than being delayed up to 5 minutes). We also ingest all email going to @discourse.mozilla.org, so there’s no need for the manual work of setting up aliases. This means we can very easily keep email addresses consistent with category names.
For instance, the #meta:help category now has an incoming email address of: meta.help@discourse.mozilla.org.
We’re keeping the old @mozilla-community.org infrastructure around for the time being so we don’t break replying from your inbox for emails sent out prior to the migration, but we’ll be switching this off once those reply keys have expired. Make sure to update your address books!
Increased email spam
Unfortunately, this fancy new email infrastructure was temporarily a spammer’s paradise. Apologies if you received notifications for any of this spam - we can delete the posts off the site, but we can’t delete the notifications out of your inbox. We’ve tightened up which categories non-registered users can post to (the main cause of this spam), and are taking further (slightly more complicated) steps to prevent this happening in future.
Remember, if you notice any spam on the site, make sure to flag it to alert moderators to the problem.