NEW CHANGE 2011/03/15: Comments are now only open for a few days after a post is made because akismet’s super-powers appear to be experiencing intermittent failures. If you want to talk to me about something I posted, just e-mail me. It’s over in the sidebar.
On-topic messages get to stay. Off-topic messages get deleted. Stop Energy messages get deleted. I do not edit messages, so messages that appear to exist more for driving link traffic than for useful content get deleted rather than having the offending link removed.
In more detail…
- This blog is my personal blog. It is my voice and only my voice. It does not represent my employers or their opinions. Just me.
- Comments are here for the benefit of me and the benefits of the reader. It is not a public forum. There is no guarantee your comment will get posted. Your comment is obviously your voice, but if you want to be sure it is heard, you may need to find another venue, such as your own blog.
- Support questions about Thunderbird in general are off-topic; go here if you need support. If the blog post is about an experimental feature and your problem deals with that experimental feature, that is on-topic.
- Complaints about Thunderbird, Thunderbird development priorities, and the direction that Thunderbird is headed are stop energy and off-topic. Something on-topic followed by something off-topic and full of stop energy gets tainted by the latter part. I am happy that Thunderbird has passionate users and I understand the desire to provide feedback about changes that make people unhappy. However, this is not the appropriate venue for that feedback.
- The best place to provide feedback is on Thunderbird’s getsatisfaction page. Please look for a topic that covers what you want to express and click the “I have this _____, too!” button. If you cannot find such a topic, create a new one, but please do a thorough search first. Mozilla Messaging has a full-time person covering getsatisfaction and others track it as well; it is not a black hole.
- Providing feedback of this type on bugs or in developer-focused forums just slows down the development process because it does not scale and it impacts my morale as a developer. When the signal-to-noise ratio decreases in my inputs, I am less productive. I am more productive when I am happy. When my inputs are discouraging, I am less happy and accordingly less productive. Many of the complaints I hear about are things we do want to fix, but are just not at the top of the extremely long list of things we need to do. The net effect is that the complaints actually reduce the likelihood of the problems getting resolved.