Firefox Support Blog

Here are the slides from my talk on SUMO at FOSDEM 2008: Project SUMO - support.mozilla.com (pdf, 4.3 MB)

Images (c) Martin Creutziger.

Last week, there were two new keywords created to help with Firefox user documentation.

• user-doc-needed
• user-doc-complete

If you see any bugs that need changes to current Firefox user documentation, or new user documentation, please add the user-doc-needed keyword.

Background bug: 418442

Firefox 3 is in beta, and we will eventually be updating articles in the Firefox Support knowledge base with Firefox 3 information. As we prepare the in-product pages for Firefox 3, we’ve also been keeping track of which current knowledge base articles will need updating.

I’ve created a page on wiki.mozilla.org to keep track. If you see knowledge base articles that will need editing for Firefox 3 changes, please add them to the linked page.

We’ve created a spreadsheet of the issues we felt would be worth having fixed in the next 3 months.  Beside each issue is a priority number which corresponds to the description in the legend.  If something isn’t on the list and you think it should be, or if you think a priority on an item is incorrect, please let us know ASAP, so we can discuss it and make a decision about it before we choose the list of issues we’d like to ask Jive to fix.

Spreadsheet is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ptjORwt3Bhd3zdNMyhTzgMw

Reply to this blog posting with any feedback. Ideally the list is finalized Friday.

As the, fairly lengthy, title of this post indicates we’re having a phone meeting to hash out which bugs and missing features in the Live Chat software are most important, or are giving us the most trouble currently.  The goal of this meeting will be to create a list of the most important fixes we’d like to see so that we can discuss them with the software’s developers at Jive.

The meeting will be tonight (Tuesday, Feb 19th) at 7PM EST/4PM PST

Call in details will be the same as our weekly meetings, except we’ll use conference room 309#

• California: 650-903-0800 then extension 91
• Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 91
• Toll-free: 800-707-2533 then password 369

Then, enter the conference number: 309#

IRC channel: #livechat (please join this if you are able, it makes linking to documents etc much easier)

We’ll be looking at this list of missing features and bugs in the current software, making sure it’s current and prioritizing each item to figure out which fixes we would like to have taken care of in the next 3 months.

For those that can’t make the meeting, we’ll link to the list we ended up with at the end of the meeting and more feedback will be welcome.

Attendees: djst, matthew (zzxc), collin1000, chris, jason, lucy, nelson

Sumo

• Weekly metrics [1]
  • Added Live Chat answer ratio, which shows the % of answered chats
    • Looks like ratio dropped the last couple of weeks; reason for it could be an increased drop in connections. Sometimes people connect and don’t write anything and then drops off.
  • Increased the top search terms from top 5 to top 10 (only counts searches on KB)
  • Discussion about how to better connect KB and Forum searches.
    • Right now it’s potentially confusing that you’re taken from KB search results to the Forum start page. Could be a better idea to show search results directly, while still allowing people to ask a question too. To discuss this in the newsgroup.
  • Increased traffic last week; possibly because of the Live Chat press coverage
• 0.5 milestone status (localization) [2]
  • Target date for milestone is Monday, February 25th
    • Most bugs should be fixed by Friday for people to test on staging server
    • Depending on testing needs, we might want to wait with the server push until Tuesday
  • Live push requested today to get some major bugs in [3] [4]
• 0.6 milestone status (in-product help) [5]
  • Jason started to work on [6], which we should try to complete in the 0.5 sync on Monday
  • Need to figure out how to handle top 10 support list with regards to l10n; djst to spearhead that this week
• All www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/ redirects were done on Thursday. Thanks to yoshino%mozilla-japan.org for figuring out the correct .htaccess script. Next step: find other links to on www.mozilla.org that point to support pages, and switch them. [7]

Knowledge Base

• 2 new article requests (en-US) [8][9], 2.5 new articles [10][11][12](third one isn’t really a new article, but an old support bug, that was moved to sumo)
• No new contributors
• Still a lot of article comments, looking for support.
• SHOWFOR
  • Quick overview here. Still needs work, but it’s a start.
  • Implemented on 17 new articles. Some articles affected by bug 413197 or bug 413192. Some are Windows specific. Dynamic content will be updated last.
  • Please help implementing this. Would rather translators translate articles after this has been implemented.

Forums

• Traffic up another 30%, now double what it was a two weeks ago.
  • Combination of 2.0.0.12 update and increased traffic site-wide.
• Contributors still doing same excellent job - very few questions go unanswered
• With increased traffic, really seeing the need for more forum features to be able to follow up better (question answered status, indication if you’ve posted in a thread)
  • New 0.7 milestone will focus on that
  • Many features depend on getting bug 409315 done. Looking for feedback on that.
    • djst to provide feedback tomorrow

Live Chat

• Revised hours
  • Introduced a new evening shift; removed the morning shift
  • Morning hours will be the next focus
  • Same hours every day of the work week now
• 10 new accounts this week, due to press?
  • A couple or three new approved trainees
  • Concerns raised by collin1000: people never online when they’re needed, around opening time for a shift
• Meeting with live chat contributors to prioritize list of bugs for Jive Software
  • Lucy to arrange meeting time and conference info and publish it on the SUMO blog and newsgroup

As most of you already know, SUMO is volunteer driven, and Live Chat is no exception.  Because of this, we’ll be constantly revisiting our officially offered hours to make sure they are the most convenient for our helpers and that they offer users the best chance at getting support.  Now that we’ve been in full swing for a month and a half our helpers have been getting a better idea of how much time they need to set aside for helping with Live Chat and when they have that time.   As such, we’ve had to make some not minor changes to our hours, but we feel they’ll be much better for everone.

The new hours are as follows:

Monday - Friday

• 1pm to 4pm
• 7pm to 9pm PST (GMT -8)

The hours are now the same Monday through Friday.  While we lose the advantage of having more varied hours, it makes it much easier to remember for users and helpers alike when we’re open.  We’ve also added an evening shift, which is more convenient for students in North America, and for many on the other side of the world.  While we’ve retained our afternoon shift, we’ve had to drop our morning hours.  Our hope is that the new consistent hours will make it easier for new helpers to become involved and that it will only be a matter of time before we’re expanding our hours again.

As always, our hours are only the times we’re trying to guarrantee someone will be around to help.  You can help, and get support at many other hours in the day.  If you find you can help during hours we aren’t already covering let us know and as soon as enough people have signed up for those times, we’ll add them.  See our article on helping with Live Chat for more information.

Attendees: djst, jason, chris, lucy, matthew, jeremy, morgamic, nelson

Sumo

• Performance issues
  • Log out [1]
  • Caching [2]
  • SUMO hasn’t been an issue for IT; load for db is fine; sometimes the whole site goes down because it locks the whole sessions table
  • Basic perf prio:
    1. Turn off auto-sessions for people not logged in
    2. Enable caching [3]
    3. Memcaching [4]
  • Things like profiling can be done to optimize the performance of the app layer
• Weekly metrics [5]
  • Top 5 search strings account for < 5% of total searches
  • Top 100 is < 18% of total searches
  • Increased searches for update, updates
• 0.5 milestone status (localization) [6]
  • Because of the added bugs, new target date is February 25th
  • UI now localizable dynamically on staging server [7]
    • Allows admins and locale leaders to translate UI strings e.g. “Table Of Contents” directly on the page, completing the l10n experience for users
    • Still some elements that are not localizable - should file a bug to keep track of those
    • Please test!
• 0.6 milestone status (in-product help) [8]
  • Target date pushed back to March 7th because of 0.5
  • Create new start page [9]
  • …then create separate in-product landing page [10]
• Suggested 0.7 milestone: Improve the forums
  • Topic answered
  • Better theme
  • More…
• In process of redirecting www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/ pages to support.mozilla.com equivalents.
• Candidate revisions to Mozilla’s web site privacy policy
  • People should read this

Knowledge Base

• Chris has started implementing the SHOWFOR plugin on the rest of the KB, but there are some major/minor bugs. [11][12]
  • SHOWFOR spans are used, which means the “OS:All” option can’t be used
  • Could use a document describing to content writers how SHOWFOR works and should be used.
• 6 new requests, 0 new articles
• No new contributors
  • We don’t have the edit this page for users not logged. This might be a reason.
  • Should definitely make “edit this page” and “translate this page” show for users not logged in [13]
• We had our first case of vandalism.
  • Someone tried to edit the Profiles article, wiping content and include a link
  • Staging system prevented it from ever going live — a testament of the awesomeness of the review system!
  • Highlighted a lack of ability to ban by IP [14]
• Still a lot of comment traffic. Text and bolding still needs work [15]
  • The bold text on “ask a support question” right above the big text area might fool people

Forums

• 25-50% increase in threads, probably due to the 2.0.0.12 upgrade
  • Lots of firewall issues
    • App on Windows that can track what Firewalls are running
    • Should ask mconnor about the connection self-diagnostics in Firefox 3
  • Looking into using trolly’s EnumProcess.
    • Sounds like he likes the input on suggested changes, and also wants help testing it
    • Jason to post link to the software in the newsgroup
• Software upgraded
  • Mostly bug fixes, e.g. permanent links to forum posts
  • Added “Report a post” feature.
  • Looking for feedback on the biggest problems. [16]
    • Not possible to cache
    • Some of the most annoying problems are not forum specific - cache bug makes us lose textarea contents when pressing back.

Live Chat

• Not much done last week
• Stats up 267 chats requested, 51 unanswered, 3 people left on their own, 48 never made it to an agent
• Updated the server this week
• Renewed license for another 6 months
• Why was Live Chat down last week?
  • Server restart, then IT upgraded the software. Everytime the server restarts, the Openfire process needs to start up manually
  • Lucy to file IT request to get this fixed

support.mozilla.com now better supports localization. There is still work to be done, but we’ve made a number of important accomplishments this week that are worth mentioning:

• Automatic language detection based on browser’s accept-lang setting. Right now it’s hard to see this in action without an account, because there are no live translations of articles yet. However, if you log in, you can go to e.g. this article. The page should then display in your primary language as specified in your browser. If the page still comes up in English when it shouldn’t, go to your user account preferences and set the language to “Site default” (which is the default for new accounts from now on).
• The locale can be hard-coded in the URL with e.g. http://support.mozilla.com/fr/kb/prefs-en-US. Note that the article name in this example gives the impression of including locale info (”prefs-en-US”), but that’s just coincidental because we haven’t renamed it to the real name yet (because we might still need to import more locales for in-product help). The locale in this case is fr.
• If you try to visit a page that is not yet translated to the language you specify, e.g. http://support.mozilla.com/fr/kb/Profiles, a notification will show up at the top of the article, informing you that the page is not yet translated.
• When a content writer makes a correction or significant change in an article that should also be updated in other translations of the article, the content writer can tick a checkbox saying “This is an significant edit of this article that should mark other translations as outdated.” By checking it, other translations of the article will automatically be marked as “potentially outdated.” Again, this is hard to try out today because we don’t have any live content that is translated. Feel free to take a stab at that!
• With the feature above, a localizer/translator can then easily see what was changed and update his/her translated copy based on a colorized diff. Of course, anyone can sign up and update a translation.
• Speaking of colorized diffs, that is also fixed now. If you don’t see it, please reload the browser to refresh your cache.

Note that we’re still working on making the whole UI localized, including strings like “Table Of Contents,” and we’ll get to it shortly.

A big thank you to Nelson Ko who has worked really hard to implement many of these changes over the weeks. Thanks also to Jason for the patch for colorized diffs, and to everyone else for testing and submitting feedback!

Attendees: djst, chris, jason, lucy, nelson, jeremy, andrew

Sumo

• Weekly metrics [1]
  • Added comments for some metrics that require changes in Tiki/Jive
  • Chris, Jason, and Lucy to go through the list and make sure we have bugs filed for the metrics requirements
• 0.5 milestone status (localization)
  • Lots of checkins last week; need to test stuff today and tomorrow
  • Auto-generated text will be using dynamic variables, and we will create a normal wiki page (only visible to locale leaders and admins) that will include all variables for easy editing
  • Depending on outcome of testing, file a request for server push on Tuesday
• In-product status
  • Bug for in-product landing page [2]
    • Let’s decide what to do with this page asap

Knowledge Base

• We are continuing to get a lot of comments from people expecting a reply. Chris stopped removing comments, so you can get a better idea of the problem.
• There are patches on the staging server for this, but we’re waiting on the “Ask a Question” page.
• No new contributors. Older contributors are continuing to contribute.
• 3 new article requests, 3 new articles
• Some confusion about article assignment, and where article discussion goes.
  • The person who verifies a KB article bug will put up a note that the discussion should continue in the discussion thread for that SUMO article instead
  • Should investigate whether we can use TikiWiki’s task tracker or generic tracker instead of Bugzilla for article requests
    • We originally chose Bugzilla because of its powerful management capabilities and to encourage existing Mozilla contributors to help us out

Forums

• Not much has changed since last week; about the same traffic
• Jason to go through a large number of the questions asked to try to get an overview of our status and what the most common problems are

Live Chat

• Firebot now tells us when Live Chat changes state in #livechat - Thanks Cww!
• New new account process: “trainee queue”
• Firebot now tells us when a new account is created - Yay Cww!
• Exam time: open less, no new helpers
• emailed and talked with jive: review or list of top bugs and prioritize