SUMO Blog

• Sumo
  • Weekly metrics [1]
    • Changed time span from Thursdays-Wednesdays to Sundays-Saturdays since we’ve changed meeting day to Tuesdays
    • “firefox 3″ and “beta” both in top 5 search terms
  • Support:Search Requirements
    • List of proposed requirements for the search engine replacement written by Jason
    • We should all read it and make sure it covers what we need.
• Knowledge Base
  • Firefox 3 articles [2]
    • Alix will provide a list of features that are more or less finalized, so we can start filing bugs for new articles for Firefox 3.
    • We can update existing articles for Firefox 3, but we need to mark the pages clearly so people running both Fx2 and Fx3 can follow the instructions.
    • Suggestion (djst: not mentioned in the meeting): use one of more keywords for articles about Firefox 3, e.g. “beta” or “firefox3″.
      • “beta” is the top 5 search term.
  • Versions plugin [3]
    • Discussion about our requirements, decision that client-based logic using js/css is the best way to go.
    • [4] summarizes our need
    • Drop-down list or menu where you can override the auto-detected Firefox version and OS, which should be remembered.
    • Version of Firefox should be “either/or,” i.e. Firefox 2 OR Firefox 3.
    • OS should preferably be “one or all,” i.e. Windows or “All OSes.” Not a requirement, though.
      • Important that pages are marked up properly so it looks good when viewing an article for all OSes or for just a single one.
    • Need to verify with WebDev that this is in line with their performance/security requirements
  • 44 unwritten articles, 5 assigned [5]
    • Everyone on the team: feel free to write articles! :)
    • We should post this list in the newsgroup and in other places (see press list)
• Forums
  • Jason ready to submit more patches as soon as his patch in bug 396810 is checked in.
    • Nelson to check this in tomorrow.
• Live Chat
  • Get started on the Live Chat front page [6]
  • Want Live Chat start page to be hosted on chat.support.mozilla.com; Lucy to contact morgamic about it

We are currently working hard to build a kick-ass Firefox support site at support.mozilla.com, also known as SUMO. However, the site is only usable for English speaking people today, representing about 50% of the Firefox user base. While providing support for 50% of our users is a good start, we plan on extending the scope of SUMO in the future, and I thought it would be a good idea to blog about these plans.

Here is the basic idea for the SUMO l10n roll-out:

1. First, focus on en-US content and make SUMO the number one support channel for the majority of our English speaking users. This includes the Knowledge Base, the Forums, and the Live Chat (milestones 0.1 – 0.4 in the SUMO Roadmap). The plan is to have everything up and running by the end of this year.
2. When milestone 0.5 (Make Knowledge Base l10n Not Suck) is finished sometime in January next year, we will start approaching locales having non-existent or very small support communities to fill out the gaps where there is limited or no Firefox support today.
   • Create localized start pages of SUMO for the majority of the locales.
   • For the big communities with already existing healthy support communities, acknowledge them by linking to their external websites from the localized SUMO start pages.
3. As localized content start to appear for the smaller communities, start approaching the larger communities and make them aware of the progress. Hopefully, it will be easier to do this when we have a working l10n solution and a vibrant international community around the project.
   • On a case-by-case basis, gradually remove links to third-party localized support sites as the content on SUMO increases.
   • Of course, as long as the third-party content is better than what we have on SUMO, we should link to it.

• Sumo
  • New meeting time
    • Proposed change: Tuesdays, 23 CET / 5 pm EST / 2 pm PST
      • Still doesn’t work for Jason
      • He might be able to ask to get time off for a meeting every other week?
  • 0.1 milestone [1] status: “I managed to code the prefs in a way that fits upstream, but after a kernel upgrade last week the test box behind the netscaler failed, so IT is currently fixing that so support-stage can work again and I can test. [...] This was fixed today, they had to use a reboot CD to physically restore the login mechanism because it got switched off of LDAP during the kernel upgrade.” — morgamic
    • Nelson to check with morgamic to see if he can volunteer to test things out.
  • Weekly metrics [2]
    • Search result for “firefox 3″ shows very old article description that was modified one week ago. Again, Google indexes way too slow for us
    • Search engine for developer.mozilla.org is Lucene Nutch. Is morgamic responsible for that? djst to ask around
    • 404 errors
      • Probably related to the IE only stylesheet
      • 20% of visitors use IE, need to make sure stylesheet is OK
  • Updated roadmap [3]
• Knowledge Base
  • l10n strategy [4]
    • When the 0.5 milestone is released, we will start approaching the smaller or non-existent communities
  • In-product help l10n requirements
    • Would really help if we could get the localized in-product help content up on SUMO using an automated script that converted the html to wiki syntax
    • Nelson to investigate how much time/effort is needed to pull that off
    • The idea is to be able to say to localizers: “hey, we have moved your content to SUMO so you can do the Firefox 3 updates there instead!”
    • If this is possible, we could use SUMO as in-product help
• Forums
  • No updates, other than the fact that we have an estimated launch of mid-December
• Live Chat
  • Lucy to mail morgamic about server issues he possibly forgot about

Last time I blogged about the SUMO milestones, the plan was to improve localization support (l10n) for the Knowledge Base before we rolled out Forums and Live Chat. Since then, however, we have decided to push l10n back for a couple of reasons:

• It makes more sense to focus on making the en-US version of support.mozilla.com rock before we start encouraging people to translate the content.
• Getting the Forums and Live Chat components of support.mozilla.com up is part of the Q4 2007 goals. If we focused on l10n before that, we would fail to deliver Forums and Live Chat before the end of the year.

Here is the updated milestone list, along with estimated release dates:

• 0.1: Upgrade TikiWiki and Stabilize Server (bug list)
  Done, pending a couple of bugs WebDev is working on
• 0.2: Make Knowledge Base Contributions Not Suck (bug list)
  ETA: Early December
• 0.3: Launch Support Forums (bug list)
  ETA: Mid-December
• 0.4: Launch Live Chat (bug list)
  ETA: End of December (can potentially be done in parallel with 0.3)
• 0.5: Make Knowledge Base l10n Not Suck (bug list)
  ETA: January 2008

So you’ve helped out with Firefox support before, be it at mozillaZine, on IRC, in newsgroups, on your own personal site, or elsewhere. That’s great! We could use your help, too. Why should you contribute to the support.mozilla.com (Sumo) Knowledge Base?

The Knowledge Base will be the first line of support for Firefox. Making sure that the content is complete and up-to-date will ensure that end users get their answer quickly. Since end users will be directed to
search the Knowledge Base before doing anything else, it will also save the community from answering the same questions over and over in forums, newsgroups, and chat.

End users can easily tell us what they thought of an article. They don’t have to log in or navigate somewhere else – the feedback mechanism is directly on the page. The top pages already have hundreds of votes and comments are rolling in at about 15 per day. This feedback is invaluable when revising an article; rather than taking educated guesses, we have concrete information from our target audience.

We can get statistics on the most popular articles and searches on a week-by-week basis. Using these statistics, we can prioritize the work we do, identify articles we’re missing, and give real data to the Firefox developers on the most common problems.

The Knowledge Base is a wiki, so anyone can contribute. One of the downsides of wikis is that while anyone can make a change for the better, anyone can also make a change for the worse. To prevent this problem, we have a review system. Changes to articles don’t go live immediately; they have to be approved first. Requesting a review is easy – just make the changes you want and add a tag called “review”, and an approver take a look.

Rather than being a plain old wiki installation, Sumo is being customized for providing support. We have more features planned, including showing different views of an article based on the user’s OS and Firefox version and localization of articles, and we’re getting the resources from Mozilla to follow through on these plans. We want to provide contributors the best tools to do their job.

See a typo in one of the Knowledge Base articles? Fix it in seconds by editing the article! Know something about Firefox that you want to share? Feel free to start working on a new article! Do you think the site sucks? Tell us why in the mozilla.support.planning newsgroup or in this blog!

Yes, we do need your help.

This week the SUMO team has been working together in the Mozilla Toronto office. Also, Nelson Ko from the TikiWiki community joined us for a couple of days. It has been a great experience to work more closely as a team. During these intense days, we’ve not only gotten to know each other more, but also:

• planned a future Video/Screencast contest, which will be a great opportunity to make support.mozilla.com better known and improve its content,
• decided on what user feedback/statistics we want to collect for the knowledge base,
• decided on how to categorize our content and how we want to present that to the users,
• fixed a number of important bugs for the (still not completed) 0.1 milestone,
• generally brainstormed and discussed various ideas and issues.

A big thanks to Nelson who prolonged his stay in Toronto to meet up with us!

Because this week has been all about working together as a team “in real life,” and because our flights would conflict with it, today’s weekly SUMO meeting will be cancelled. Regular meetings will resume again on November 8th.