For a few years we have been running a forum for add-on developers. It’s linked to from the Developer Hub on AMO and has been a good place for discussions about add-ons, particularly add-on development. Unfortunately, we haven’t had the time or resources to keep it properly running and up to date. The software it runs on (phpBB) is notoriously unstable and difficult to manage. It’s time for a change.

We’ve set up an Add-ons category in the Mozilla Community forum. This is the new official home for discussions about add-ons. Its main benefits are better integration with the larger Mozilla community, authentication with Persona (also used on Bugzilla, MDN, and others), reliable maintenance by Community IT, and running on a more modern forum platform called Discourse. With Discourse you can subscribe to posts or entire categories and interact with them like you would with a mailing list, which great for those who (like me) prefer a more old school approach.

This is the current plan for the forum move:

On July 1st, the old forum will be switched to read-only mode. In the meantime we’ll encourage all current forum users to move to the new one. On September 1st, the old forum will be decommissioned. We might try to keep a static copy of its contents somewhere, but for now you should assume that all content will be lost. We looked into migrating the old content to the new forum, but getting all the right sign-offs (legal, IT, security, etc.) proved to be too much for it to be worthwhile.

There are more details about the move in this announcement.

We’re very excited to join the rest of the Mozilla community in the new Discourse forum. Please give it a try and join the discussion!