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:
- New helpers shouldn’t be able to open help without a Room Monitor to supervise
- They need to be able to get to users without waiting for me to approve them
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.