Mozilla is a big project involving hundreds of people around the world, with a whole lot going on.  How do you keep track of all that's happening?  We have a bunch of forums that vary on everything from their target audience (more technical versus less technical) to their style (forum based, blog based, email based etc).

It's important to remember that you don't have to watch everything in order to keep up on the area you are interested in.  As an example, let's pretend that our new tester John is interested in working on the Firefox tab bar.  Here's how he can watch exactly enough of the project so that he knows what is happening in his feature.

1. He joins QMO so he knows when test days are scheduled.
2. He subscribes to a handful of newsgroups:

• mozilla.dev.quality - Everything testing related will be discussed here.
• mozilla.dev.apps.firefox - Everything Firefox related, especially UI items will be discussed here.
• mozilla.dev.planning - All planning messages, meeting notices, scheduling decisions are decided here

3. He goes to the bugzilla email preferences and decides to follow the artificial "user" called: tabbed.browser@firefox.bugs.  This will ensure he sees all activity with those bugs.  For more information on how to use this panel, ask on IRC in #qa.

With those settings, John would have about 20-40 messages a week, all fairly well scoped to his area of interest.  I'll start a forum post on how to actually go about subscribing to these items since sometimes that can be tricky (the Bugzilla email pane is a good example).  Also, people can share their own mechanisms for keeping up with Mozilla.

So, how do you find out about these different forums?  Just have a look below.  I've ordered the list so that the items at the top of the list have the best signal-to-noise ratio for someone starting out with Mozilla QA.  It goes without saying that for different purposes, this list would have different orders.

I've also used the nicknames we have for each of these items so that you can understand the "Mozilla veterans" when they talk.  If you roll over the links, you'll have its full name in a tooltip.

Note that all of these forums are two-way streets.  You are encouraged and expected to respond and participate.  If you ever have any uncertainty on how best to participate jump on IRC (#qa) and we can help ensure your thought/question/post lands in the proper and correct forum.

Welcome aboard!