The Mozilla Blog

Getting help when you have a problem with your browser is great. Getting this help from a community of volunteers around the world is Mozilla!

Earlier this week, we launched version 1.0 of Mozilla’s community support project called SUMO — this is the project behind the popular support site Firefox Support. Driven by the Mozilla community, SUMO has already made a big difference to Firefox users around the world.

Currently, support.mozilla.com answers approximately 2,000 users’ questions every week through the Support Forum and Live Chat features. And over 1,000 users per day are reporting that the Knowledge Base solved their problem.

What makes this all the more interesting is that all the answers in the forum and Live Chat are provided by Mozilla volunteers. These people are passionate about the Mozilla project and the Firefox browser, and are not paid customer support agents — which is very different to a traditional support helpdesk. All translations for Knowledge Base articles are provided by volunteers, making SUMO a global support site.

Version 1.0 of SUMO includes improvements to localization, which will allow more volunteers to get involved, helping translation of support articles and ultimately, solving more user problems.

SUMO aims to create a centralized support channel, and has initially focused on supporting the Firefox browser. However, the platform is designed to be used by other Mozilla projects, and other community-driven software projects in the future.

Aside from support.mozilla.com, there are also a number of independent community sites around the world dedicated to supporting Mozilla’s products, for example Gecko Zone, Mozilla Hispano and Mozilla Italia.

Check out the SUMO blog for the full story and the road to SUMO 1.0 — and please visit http://support.mozilla.com/ to give us your feedback, get support or to provide support for other Firefox users!