SUMO Blog

I posted earlier about our system for doing Live Chat approvals. Unfortunately this fell apart for two reasons. First being, I’m the only one who can flip the switch on accounts. Second being, most new helpers were coming around after hours, which is great, that’s when we need more helpers, but that also meant I wasn’t around. We quickly realized this wasn’t going to work.

The ideal solution needed to take several things into account:

1. New helpers shouldn’t be able to open help without a Room Monitor to supervise
2. They need to be able to get to users without waiting for me to approve them
3. They need to see the same UI as they would in a regular help chat

We stuck our heads together, and came up with what we think will be a working solution. So with many apologies to those who signed up and were never approved, here’s how it works now.

1. Sign up for an account though the Spark client as always. Instead of being automatically added to the support group, or having to wait for approval, you’ll now be added to a “trainees” group.
2. Join the Contributors conference. Let people know that you’re new and would like to be invited to help chats. You can also let us know in #livechat on irc.mozilla.org
3. Watch for invitations to join help chats. When we’re open and taking requests, the trainees group will be invited to shadow these chats using the same alerts and UI that you’ll see when taking requests yourself.
4. Help out a few requests to learn the ropes. Once you’ve followed and helped with enough chats to pick up how things work, the helpers you’ve been working with will let me know that you’re ready to help users on your own. I’ll add people to the support team when I’m around. This will usually be within 24 hours of being told you’re ready.

If you’ve already signed up for an account but were never approved, please let me know here, send me or someone else a message on Spark, or let someone know on IRC. I’ll make sure to take care of these accounts ASAP. Again, I apologize whole heartedly for the process fail. Please let us know if there are still issues with the new process.

If this is new to you and you’d like to help out, get started here.

Sumo

• Weekly metrics [1]
  • Significant increase of traffic the last couple of weeks, due to the mozilla.com Support link for en-US
  • Top 3 search result is Thunderbird — also due to the mozilla.com Support link.
    • Need to do something about that. Suggested mockup that moves the menu up above the fold and introduces a big link to Thunderbird. [2]
• 0.5 milestone status (localization)
  • Make auto-generated content localizable [3]
    • Either we do it using SVN, or we do it on a web interface (would require approx. 2 days of development for Nelson to finish).
      • Short-term, it might be easiest to just mail out the config file per locale to the locale owners and merge them back into the trunk ourselves.
  • Locale detection? [4]
    • SUMO will automatically detect the locale based on the language settings in Firefox.
• Nelson will check in Jason’s patches and schedule a live server resync this week.

Knowledge Base

• Last week: 2 new article requests, 0 new articles. The previous week: 9 new article requests, 4 new articles.
  • Possible reasons: many current contributors are working on previous articles assigned to them. Maybe spending time contributing in the forum, which is getting a lot more traffic now.
• In-product status
  • All 36 locales imported [5]
  • 24 locales responded
    • 15 locales fully committed to updating their content for Firefox 3
  • 13 localizers haven’t responded yet
  • Chris has started work on updating the 13 en-US articles for Firefox 3. Still needs review, and we also need to check with the development team to make sure we’re not jumping the gun.

Forums

• Increased traffic lately; 400 new threads per week
• New forum moderator: Quarantine
• More people answering questions in the forum too
• No non-English questions in the forum
• Question about opening forums in other languages
  • We will probably not do this before Firefox 3 is launched
  • Would be interesting to figure out the need for forums in other locales first

Live Chat

• Update from Matthew (zzxc), Live Chat contributor (Lucy sick this week)
  • Live Chat currently closed, despite being the official open hours.
  • After the Digg effect, the number of contributors went from around 80 to about a dozen.

The Knowledge Base (KB) is the front line of support.mozilla.com. As shown by the prominence of the search box on the front page, we want users to try to searching the Knowledge Base before anything else. One of the ways we make the KB as complete as possible is to pay attention to what people are asking about in the forums and on live chat.

If you notice multiple people asking about something not in the KB, please make an article request for that subject. You don’t have to write the article yourself (though it’d be great if you did!); it’s just important that we identify what we’re missing. While all article requests go through Bugzilla (Sumo product, KB Articles component), you can also request the article in the contributors forum or on mozilla.support.planning if you’re uneasy about using Bugzilla.

It’s a little bit of extra work up front, but it saves time and makes things better in the long run.

• End users will be able to find the solution themselves, so you’ll be less likely to have to answer the same question again.
• For those that do ask, you won’t have to type out the instructions; you can just link to the KB article.
• Other contributors won’t have to figure out the problem themselves; they’ll find it in the KB.
• Your solution will be improved to cover all cases. For example, if you’re on Windows and the problem can happen on Mac or Linux, other contributors can fill in the platform-specific bits for you.
• We can gather statistics on KB articles much more easily than we can for forum threads or chat sessions. These stats can be used to improve our support offering and to provide hard numbers back to the Firefox development team on frequent issues.

For those of you not yet familiar with the new Live Chat software, we have it set that while everyone can sign up for an account to help, only people who have been approved can actually take questions from users. Last week we didn’t do any new approvals, and we apologize for the delay to those of you who have been signed up and waiting patiently. The software is new to us as well and we took the time to familiarize ourselves with the user control options that are available (and which ones aren’t). This helps give us an idea of how many approvals we can do at once, while still making sure we’re providing a quality service to our users.

We’re doing new approvals this week, so if you’d like to help, drop by during our hours of operation. We’ll only be doing a few at a time so that we can monitor new helpers, and guide them. If you have any questions you can find us either via the conference feature in the product, or drop by #sumo on irc.mozilla.org.

With the “Support” header on the US English version of mozilla.com now pointing to support.mozilla.com, the Firefox Support Forum has seen its numbers jump quite a bit; on Friday, we got about 70 questions posted. I’d like to thank cor-el, Bo, and Quarantine, who have each posted over 50 responses in the forum since it opened. It’s a testament to the dedication of the Mozilla community that volunteers answer the hundreds (or even thousands) of support questions across the different sites. How many products out there do people care enough about to spend their time giving customer support?

If you’d like to help out with forum support on support.mozilla.com, just jump right in and start answering questions. Here are a few tips:

• Look in the Knowledge Base for answers. You can link to Knowledge Base articles with double parenthesis. For example, to link to the Safe Mode article, you type ((Safe Mode)).
• You can also use other resources to solve people’s problems, like previous forum threads, mozillaZine Knowledge Base articles, mozillaZine forum threads, newsgroup postings, etc. To link to any URL, use a square bracket, the URL, a pipe, the link text, then another square bracket. For example, [http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode/|Safe mode].

Here are the meeting minutes of yesterday’s SUMO meeting — our first meeting of 2008.

• Sumo
  • Weekly metrics [1]
    • Live Chat launch was digged, causing a significant traffic increase.
  • In-product Help
    • Plan is to move forward with the in-product help import:
      • Final fixes of script and live server push on Tuesday
      • Start of en-US and fr import on Wednesday to evaluate with French localizer Cédric Corazza
    • Everyone, please join the discussion about what new articles to include for Firefox 3 [2]
  • This week, we’ll change the top link to Support on mozilla.com and mozilla.org to point directly to SUMO
    • Prepared for this last week by adding a navigation path to Thunderbird users
• Knowledge Base
  • 27 articles written since last meeting
  • Over 50% of articles written by community members
• Forums
  • Forum launched!
  • So far, near 100% answer ratio on new threads
  • Great help from the community (cor-el, Bo)
  • Needs more traffic, which should happen this week
    • djst made a very, very funny joke about posting some questions himself in the forum — it wasn’t well received
• Live Chat
  • Live Chat launched!
  • Incredible community reaction, a HUGE thanks to everyone who helped us out during the first very hectic days in the middle of the holidays
  • At least 15 new contributors readily available to help Firefox users
  • Stats
    • Lucy to update the Weekly Metrics document to include the relevant stats for this and fill it in weekly, prior to the SUMO meetings
  • Software eval by contributors
    • Great, new initiative by some community members to draft a possible future live chat solution based on an XMPP plugin that could work with existing IM clients, e.g. Pidgin.
    • Will soon be moved to a dedicated wiki site

As we’re getting a better overview of what to expect with the upcoming Firefox 3 release, it’s time to decide what end-user documentation we want to include in all locales. In Firefox 2, there is an in-product help available (Help > Firefox Help in the menu) with a specific set of topics.

The in-product documentation has traditionally covered the basics, such as how to navigate a web page, and references like keyboard shortcuts and the Options/Preferences window. While that general approach still makes sense, Firefox 3 includes new exciting features that we might want to cover as well. For example, Places and the “Awesome bar” might be features that we’d rather introduce our users to than how to manage cookies.

Since we are going to use SUMO (support.mozilla.com) as the new “in-product” help (technically, no longer in-product), we are planning on doing a content migration from the current content to SUMO for all locales that have translated content. This would save a lot of time for the localizers, who would then only have to update the content for Firefox 3, rather than writing (or copying & pasting) everything from scratch. The script is mostly done; we just need to decide what we want to do with the current content. What should be kept? What should be added? What should be removed? What about its structure?

I’ve started a discussion thread in mozilla.support.planning. Firefox 3 developers and support content writers: please join the discussion and help figuring out what content we need!

Note that the English version of SUMO will eventually cover all new features in Firefox 3; this discussion is just about the subset of articles that we want to declare as part of the in-product help experience, and as such, in need of localization/translation.

Thanks to Ehsan Akhgari, Jason Barnabe, David Baucum, and Steve England, we are making steady progress with the Knowledge Base!

Of the original 33 articles, 15 have already been written. That means 18 articles left to be written:

• 399520 – Internet Explorer terminology – Done
  
• 401769 – Chrome registration failed – Done
• 404887 – Troubleshooting extensions – Done
• 398633 – Windows error opening Internet shortcut or local HTML file
• 398635 – How to change the “latest headlines” feed – Done
• 398639 – Search suggestions – Done (Ehsan)
• 398641 – Exporting data to Internet Explorer – Done
• 398642 – Exporting data to Safari
• 398643 – Exporting data to Opera – Done (David)
• 398644 – Exporting data to Netscape
• 398645 – Exporting data to SeaMonkey
• 398646 – Exporting data to Mozilla Suite
• 398650 – DOM Inspector
• 398678 – Auto form fill – Done
  
• 399392 – Firefox.exe always open
• 399506 – Transferring data to a new profile – Assigned (Steve)
• 399508 – Clipboard not working
• 399509 – Autoconnect – Done (Ehsan)
• 399510 – Granting JavaScript access to the clipboard – Done (Ehsan)
• 399513 – Configuring keyboard shortcuts
• 399626 – How Do I disable 3rd Party Cookies? – Done (Jason)
• 400052 – Add troubleshooting links to help articles
• 400913 – Error writing to xpcom_core.dll
• 400916 – Reloading live bookmarks – Done (Ehsan)
• 401261 – Unresponsive script warning
• 401264 – Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete
• 401265 – Firefox only prints the first page
• 401267 – Firefox makes unrequested connections – Done (Steve)
• 401336 – Upgrading from Firefox 1
• 404931 – Links do not open in Firefox
• 404933 – Firefox always starts in Safe Mode – Done (Jason)
• 405950 – Document custom install options
• 406096 – Moving from Windows to Mac

Just click on the number link and either assign the bug to you or post a comment in the bug that you plan to write it (if you don’t have a Bugzilla account, just post a comment here and I’ll do the work for you), then create an article. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the formatting used — the important thing is that we get the content. We can always fix the rest afterwards.