You said “MozillaZine is the obvious alternative to both Get Satisfaction and SUMO.” However, the Thunderbird 3 support plan appears to state that Mozilla Messaging plans to hide the existence of the MozillaZine forums, and view us only as a source of knowledge base articles. Mozilla promotes their own support forum but they still provide a link to other community support such as the MozillaZine forums. We understand why Mozilla Messaging wants to promote SUMO and GetSatisfaction but don’t want to be ignored.

The “Why are we personna non grata?” thread at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1505745 discusses this issue. The support lead posted a reply in that thread that says “we on the Mozilla Thunderbird team intend to continue to collaborate with MozillaZine”. However, it didn’t address most of the concerns raised in the thread and we don’t see any real sign of collaboration. All of the collaboration appears to be in one direction only – from members of the MozillaZine forums who are also on the QA team, file bug reports, comment on the Thunderbird 3 planning document etc.

Sure, thanks Fennec, but it’s worth pointing out that productizing SUMO has been part of my vision for SUMO ever since I joined Mozilla to lead the project (see e.g. http://djst.org/blog/2008/01/15/the-scope-of-sumo/), and I’ve been in close contact with Roland and others the last few months to see how we can work together on this. In other words, if it wasn’t for the Fennec team’s “let’s just do it” attitude, Thunderbird would easily have beat Fennec to it.