Firefox Support Blog

• Sumo
  • Weekly metrics [1]
    • The 0.2 resync [2], planned early this week, will give us a lot more useful statistics
  • 0.1 [3] and 0.2 [4] status
    • morgamic has promised to work on the last 0.1 bug [5] this week
  • According to morgamic, we should be ready to (try to) switch the Support link on www.mozilla.com to point directly to SUMO
    • This depends on getting a link up on the start page to guide people looking for support on other products to another page. (”Not looking for help with Firefox?”)
• Knowledge Base
  • In-product help plan [6]
    • Still haven’t heard from pascalc or axel
    • Responded to feedback from some of the l10n community
    • Need to formalize on a plan for the in-product help implementation, including caching, searching, table of contents vs search, etc
      • djst to talk to Nelson about search, morgamic caching, and mconnor + beltzner about implementation
  • Inventory of articles needed updating for Firefox 3
    • Chris to publish a list of articles that need to be updated for Firefox 3 (about 15 articles)
• Forums
  • 0.3 status [7]
  • Forum launch activities
    • Estimation of traffic
      • The server traffic will probably not change much with the roll-out of forum
      • The number of comments in the KB articles is about 30 per week, which means we’ll see at least that amount of forum posts, most probably more since forums are more targeted at support
      • The question is whether or not we will find enough people to handle the volume
        • Getting people to volunteer in the forum is probably going to be easier than getting people to write articles — just look at the ratio of forum answers / article writers at mZ
    • Throttling
      • We should start by linking to both the mZ forums and SUMO forums, to distribute the load until we get a better overview
• Live Chat
  • Server ready by the end of this week
  • Some things can and should be done before that, e.g. verifying privacy policy (djst), test preparations (Lucy), etc

Starting next week, the weekly SUMO meeting will be scheduled on Mondays, at:

• 10 AM Mountain View (PST)
• 12 PM Winnipeg
• 1 PM Toronto (EST)
• 7 PM Europe (CET)

These meetings are completely open to anyone who is interested in contributing to Firefox Support! Don’t hesitate to call in even if you just want to lurk in the background. For information on how to call in to the toll-free conference call, see the Weekly Meetings page.

This week, the meeting was held yesterday, and the minutes of the meeting can be found here.

Last week, we upgraded support.mozilla.com with the latest changes from the staging server. I thought this would be a good opportunity to highlight some of the more useful changes.

Tags in This Article

All knowledge base article now list their associated tags in the sidebar. Previously, a list of all available tags in the knowledge base was shown instead, which wasn’t exactly ideal. Tags are a very powerful way to connect relevant articles together, which also makes them easier to find.

Related Articles

Articles that are closely related to the knowledge base article you’re currently viewing are now conveniently listed in the sidebar. This makes the article tagging more useful, and helps finding relevant content if you’re interested in a specific Firefox topic.

Unified Breadcrumb

Previously, the breadcrumb for SUMO itself was located under the article name, while the global mozilla.com breadcrumb was still at the top left corner of the page. The two breadcrumbs have now been neatly unified, making the SUMO website appear more integrated with mozilla.com.

Better Top 10 List

The Top 10 Support Articles list has been temporarily hard-coded instead of being automatic, because we were having a number of problems:

• It listed articles that aren’t really articles per se, such as the start page itself, and the Contributor Home Page.
• It made some of the articles in the other “New to Firefox?” box appear twice.
• It used the accumulated page hits to calculate the rating, which is skewed towards old article.

Until we have fixed all issues, we will update the list manually on a weekly basis.

Better Log in/Log out Links

The information about how to contribute, and the log in link are easier to find now that they’re separated. In addition, it’s now easier to see if you’re logged in or not.

When logged in, the top right corner link changes to “My Account” and “Log out”. Small, but subtle changes making it easier to use the site as a contributor.

Speaking of contributors, there will be even more improvements next week that will make it easier for contributors to edit articles, and for reviewers to approve edits. Stay tuned for more updates!