Is there any chance to move away from the Discourse? It's a bit too slow (on any page opening), but the biggest issue is its hostile habit of catching the browser "find in page" hotkey (replacing the local find with the remote site search).
I know you can press it again or something but for the love of $deity don't fuck with the defaults.
That said I'm equally angry my browser so happily allows this.
Sure if it's a proper web application like OnShape then sure, override default key bindings, but ask me first and remember my choice. If I say no then just don't feed those keystrokes to the webpage.
Still wish pages would stop hijacked hot-keys in the first place, but hope this helps.
How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC?
Given the strange coincidence with the social media outrage over TOU fiasco, I don't know who to be scratching my puzzled head at here.
Better version would be „One of Mozilla sites is in read-only mode…“
I would wonder if this is really something much simpler: an excuse to make things read-only, while implying that people really should give them money if they want things to work.
Really, I can't lose any more respect for Mozilla at this point. It's all gone.
Not saying this is Mozilla’s policy, just pointing out it may be an accident or it may be a lack of funds, or something entirely different.
However, that was always sorted out during negotiations.
I'll add telcos to this list. Absolutely the worst customers to have. Net90 paid on time was a good thing.
I'm beyond certain that someone will reply "use a cloud provider", which is ironic, as cloud providers just concentrate these kinds of ops people and charge you through the nose (often an order of magnitude more in my experience) than having people responsible.
Unpopular opinion, probably, because people seem to like dehumanising operations issues on this site- sure, things can be automated, but at some point there's got to be some responsibility.
Also, I don't know if you're aware of this, but technology has advanced sufficiently that nobody needs to manually pay a monthly bill anymore. I know it sounds crazy, but there's these things called "bill pay", and "recurring credit card changes", that have existed for 20ish years now. Might want to read up on the latest trends!
Coinciding with techie social media outrage over the TOU fiasco, and repeatedly mishandled by corporate, so now the read-only mode means the outrage can't spread to Mozilla forums, where it might reach a wider audience?
"Mozilla's Discourse forum is in read-only mode due to overdue hosting payments"
The current title gives the false impression that mozilla.org is down.
Would you be up for a service which allowed you to automatically share intelligence on which companies are late payers? Benefits would potentially be:
- Find out in advance how late your will be paid
- Early warning of creditors doing aggressive cash management (aka going bust)
The idea would be that it would be funded by selling information about payers (not payees) eg, to insurance companies.
NB the obvious way to implement this is to get access to bank transactions, which I know requires a lot of trust. But maybe with eg the Open Banking API, there's some way to do it such that you can trust that only the right information is shared.
Also consider that those types of things happen after several rounds of ignored warnings.
I guess we should expect more incidents like this the time to come.
Mozilla has hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and over a billion in investments according to their last financial statement -- so, no, they are not.
90% of Mozilla’s direct income (cash) comes from Google. And it looks like that funding may go away soon [1].
If Firefox had a big marketshare they might be able to capitalise on that, but right now it’s the lowest it’s ever been, and they keep on burning bridges.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/why-googles...
Could you provide a reason why that is a feature?
All the extensions I’ve implemented runs fine as V3 manifests, and they allow much more fine-grained security permissions. That’s something I’m happy with, even as a developer. It limits the security impact of whatever flaws my extension may have.
This website fucking sucks.
It is way more likely to be an oversight.
I also run a B2B SaaS and I have found that over time the customers who I think are going to be terrible for paying, typically tend to be very good at paying and the customers who I think are going to be very good for paying (in that they have good standing in the community in things like that) tend to be pretty bad at paying on time (and with NET30 and all)
Ultimately I don't really understand why I shouldn't be paid on time (I've got to live too, and I have suppliers likewise) so I think this is pretty fair game, I sold you a product under the promise that you would pay in 30 days, if you're incapable of doing that (ignoring exceptional reasons) I don't necessarily want to go and lend you extra credit just because you're Mozilla
Having a terrible accounts receivable department isn't a exceptional reason.
You'll be able to find them a few years down the road complaining that the mean old IRS is being so unfair because of the little bit of tax evasion that's totally not as bad as those real scammers on welfare.
But you'd do a courtesy call before cutting off a B2B customer? Even just to make sure they got the bill, and that a payment they made hadn't mistakenly not been credited. Which would be an opportunity for an immediate funds transfer or CC charge, if necessary to keep the site up. (Also an opportunity for them to say, "Actually, if you could just make it read-only until the news cycle is over..." :)
Also consider how many bridges you would burn if it’s in error. Or it’s a disputed payment.
It's easy for it to happen if a colleague is away for a month, or has left, and the bill isn't being seen by anyone. Do you read (do you even receive?) out-of-office replies to your invoices?
Of course it shouldn't be on an individual's email, but with annual billing it's easy to overlook.
My employer can be really bad at paying NET30, especially on fluctuating "pay for what you use" bills due to all the bureaucracy. Since it's not a fixed amount it can't be rubber stamped by anyone... And dear lord help you if you issue an invoice followed by credits separately...
We always pay the bill, but the purchasing employee has to review it (they're the only ones that can evaluate the claimed usage), then the department head has to approve it, then department finance processes it.. the division finance has to then rubber stamp it... Then the controller had to release the funds.
I see notices all the time where we're ~3-5 days late (often times the money has already been sent, but hasn't hit the sellers account yet)
I feel a good desire to fork the browser (ff or one of its forks) to be able build it for myself with a set of debloat patches. Just to avoid worrying about tracking and the "sell your data" stuff.
The drama comes from Mozilla's nonpayment, not Discourse's policy. Weird to try to pin the blame on Discourse.
Easily 7 figures, possibly 8 figures. Enterprise sales are a weird realm.
This. Just this. I'd say websites should be able to "offer" their own search, so when you do find-in-page it shows the default search with a button to "change to custom website search ([ ] remember)" or so.
"It's ok if I am late with the bill, they will feel bad for me and never risk me reputation damage by airing out my debts".
But in the absence of a sense of responsibility or obligation, shame might be the only thing that might work to make them fulfill their obligations.
Paying your bills should be first priority. No excuse, no crying. If you fail, fully own to it and terminate the chain of command involved.
Having basic transparency like "this service is in read-only due to nonpayment" really helps internal users to realize the company is being a bad customer. Which then pushes the company's reps to actually pay for the service.
So, no it's not inexcusable.
Keeping quiet when it's something simple is more weird to me. God forbid someone assumes massive corpo X is going bankrupt because of a web hosting bill..
So even companies you might think will pay promptly, don't always do so.
The entitlement is strong with some people. It is "a" force. But more tied to mediocrity than midiclorians. . .
In general, we quickly act on obvious bugs/regressions on major websites. Often, such major issues on big websites are caused by certain add-ons or antivirus software.
> uBlock Origin relies heavily on the webRequest API to block unwanted content before it loads. Under MV3, the webRequest API is limited, and extensions are encouraged to use the new declarativeNetRequest API instead. This new API allows for predefined rules but lacks some of the dynamic capabilities that uBlock Origin utilizes for advanced content blocking.
Same for NoScript.
Some may want extensions with unchecked, unrestricted permissions to be able to do all-the-things (tm).
Me on the other hand (and possibly others), with open-source projects often going haywire and crazy over time, feel more comfortable knowing that extensions cannot do more than I have permitted them.
I guess this is for the market to decide. If V2 provides enough value for enough users, it will stick around.
Unless these snowflakes enter panic mode because "Mozilla is selling all my files" and stop using Firefox for reasons that cannot be explained by logic, which I see is majority of news unfolding after Mozilla changed their wording.
I'll work collegially with customers/partners who I think are being honest, or who can be nudged towards that from a somewhat different industry convention. But I wouldn't take "the check's in the mail" from someone who I thought was being dishonest. And an immediate payment would be appropriate for even honest people to do, in light of neglecting to mail a check in time.
In your scenario, the hosting company’s reaction seems extreme. In mine, it seems mild. The truth is we just don’t know and should refrain from bold defences until more details are in.
It's not the provider's responsibility to help their customer get their sh#t together.
That's a problematic customer you don't want unless you're otherwise broke or want to keep them for other reasons (e.g. publicity).
If they can pay, then just pay for the service they got.
Seems pretty straightforward.
It seems like Mozilla has made quite a lot of errors in the past few years.
Why TF would important things like that go to a single person's individual mailbox?
Take a couple hours to set up a canned ticketing / helpdesk thing or something, and have bills and other vendor alerts go to that email alias.
Some then make it difficult to use a more appropriate address.
It's not ideal, but there's a huge amount of IT that doesn't follow the official policies — like all the teams using AWS rather than going through their official procurement procedure.
The ones that contact support for every little thing or those that have a million strange feature requests on the other hand.
Maybe they sent all the extra invoices? It sounds like you are assuming discontinuing the service was the first and only thing they tried.
The time this happened to us, I was pleased the company looked at our website and phoned the receptionist. We paid the bill within an hour, and moved the responsibility to the finance and IT teams.
Maybe there are too many customers who just ignore bills for services they no longer want to use, I don't know, but given these companies usually have a sales team it would seem worth the time to make a call or write a personal email to an existing customer to maintain their custom.
You are telling me:
1. Microsoft should have tried to find a different way to contact and reach out.
2. That you would have moved your eMail/Groupware to someone else because of that.
To each their own.
I think their time would be well spent contacting a customer who hasn't paid.
Blocking sending email would also be a more reasonable step before blocking receiving email.
And yes, I'd consider moving.