Eyes Above The Waves

Very few people are surprised to find personal statements in email signatures. Email signatures have been commonly used that way since email began. Some people may not like my signatures, but I have never ever had anyone complain they were "off topic". Newsgroups are an extension of email in this respect. [I'm surprised to hear there are people who think I should be compelled to stop using Bible verses in email signatures. I've been using email and newsgroups for 20 years and never knowingly encountered such a person.] Likewise, people are rarely surprised to find non-Mozilla discussion on some Mozilla IRC channels or in Mozilla offices. Importantly, people don't quickly visit IRC or the halls of Mozilla offices, or my email signatures, expecting to digest a bunch of Mozilla-related content there and finding something else.

I'm surprised more haven't said it to you directly. There's a non-trivial amount of discomfort, even hostility to your signatures -- and to Christianity in general, from people around the Mozilla community . (It's unfortunate that we are an intolerant bunch.) I know this because I'm pretty regularly involved in conversations about questionable content in the Mozilla universe, from blogs to bugzilla to email, and your name comes up literally every time. I see Gerv catch it. I seen Benjamin catch it. I see Channy catch it. Many Mozillians are quite bothered by any expression of Christianity coming from other Mozillians. Your signatures cover more newsgroup ground than all of the "controversial" posts at Planet combined. I did a quick count of your newsgroup postings over the years and it's staggering. In my incomplete archive, you have shared off-topic (and offensive to many) religious content in your newsgroup postings more than a thousand times from the email address robert@ocallahan.org. Planet's seen overtly christian content posted fewer than a couple of dozen times in its entire history. I don't think we should be policing that kind of thing. I actually really like that we share with each other some of our personal lives, interests, and motivations. That's a big piece of what attracted me to Mozilla almost 15 years ago and it's a big reason why I'm still here that much later. I hope we can be a community of intelligent and accepting adults who are willing to share our ideas and our beliefs with each other openly and constructively and I'm deeply saddened that we seem to be unable to do that and so we resort to discouraging that kind of communication in our public spaces. I often laugh at the failures of other open source projects which just can't seem to get products right. But now I'm laughing at us because, while open source communities all across the Web seem to handle Planets with lots of personal content just fine, we're not mature enough to do the same. Maybe we're just too corporate for something like that.

This is the key point: other open source projects do *NOT* handle personal content "just fine". For example, Planet GNOME is drowning under not-GNOME-relevant content and has also had several terrible flame-wars degenerating into bitter personal attacks. I don't want to see that on Planet Mozilla.

Asa: OK, that's interesting, but my first-hand experience is that over the last twenty years of prolific emailing, I recall receiving just one negative comment about my email signatures (from a complete stranger). If there's a large silent population that has a problem with them, I wish they'd mention it to me directly. Anyway, your points are tangential to my main point. planet.mozilla.org should stick to Mozilla-related content because that's what people expect to find there, whether or not they find non-Mozilla content that shows up offensive.

Planet has a convenient OPML link to make it easy to subscribe to everyone's feeds, or to customize those subscriptions as desired. If you follow the Planet blog, you can get updates on feed changes and adjust your personal subscriptions accordingly. I've been doing this for awhile, partly because I want to get uncensored feeds (roc's was one such feed), and partly because I just don't have enough time in the day to follow all the feeds I follow *and* follow some of the people on planet who just aren't quite relevant enough to what I do (mostly marketing/PR, but I've added various other areas along the way -- I can't kid myself that I'm close enough to being a webdev any more to get much out of modern webdev posting, alas).