Firefox Support Blog

Attendees: djst, cilias, np, Lucy, nkoth, zzxc

Sumo

• Weekly metrics [1]
  • djst: is the start page bounce rate useful? Should run the stats through the one and only Mr Ken Kovash to see if we can extract some more interesting data.
  • Is “New contributors” just anyone who signed up as a contributor? If so, a better stat would be the subset of those who actually contributed. -np
    • That would be more useful, but is currently not possible.
  • Would really help if we could extract the weekly metrics automatically every week. nkoth to ask webdev team for potential ways of doing this while maintaining security policies.
  • Staging articles shouldn’t have polls [2]
  • Is there a bug filed for not having polls on certain pages? -np
    • These need to be removed on a case by case basis, but we need to fix the above bug or they will come back when someone edits.
• SUMO Day 2
  • Original suggestion of Friday May 16 is bad because djst will be traveling. Also, there can be benefits of launching the screencast contest prior to the SUMO day, since that’s another thing people can get involved with during the day.
  • New date decided: Friday, May 23
  • Focus should be on forum and Live Chat. djst will create a copy of the existing wiki planning page to get started.
• UI l10n update from nkoth: cleaned up versions of language.php have been checked in to SVN. They include all strings that we use, including stuff that were not in the db unless previously created.
  • Will test this with a couple of localizers to make sure this is what they want, and then announce this. djst suggests aksu, the Finnish localizer.

Knowledge Base

• Bugzilla: 6 new article requests [3], 4 new articles [4]
• Changing the default diff view [5]
• 27 article feedback comments are from people looking for support
  • Compared with the total number of sessions, only 0.01% of the visitors are making this mistake. Could be hard to reduce this number even further.
  • cilias suggests replacing “click here” link to something more descriptive and will file a bug for it. Maybe that can help reducing the number of people mistakenly using article feedback as a way to ask for support.
• Ideas for troubleshooting walkthrough
  • Current Basic Troubleshooting article is not very basic, and might not do a good job of guiding users into finding the appropriate support article for their particular problem. We should create a truly basic troubleshooting article that does a better job.
  • We are currently using the first paragraph of articles as a brief summary of what problem is solved in that particular article. The problem is that this summary isn’t used in e.g. search results. This should definitely be part of the new requirements for the search SoC project.
• New French localizers: Diti and omnisilver. Welcome aboard!

Forums

• Still waiting for patches[6] to get looked at
  • np should get SVN checkin access for simple patches. It will simplify for both np and nkoth. djst to fix this this week.
• Nothing terribly interesting stats-wise

Live Chat

• Lucy: Not much interest in starting an earlier shift based on feedback gathered from volunteers because we’re only supporting English chat.
  • djst: Are we sure the en-US only support is the reason for this? Will look into the legal aspects of offering Live Chat support in other languages to better know about our options moving forward.
• zzxc: Got a few new trainees last Friday — will see if they stick around!

Remember the discussion a few days ago about a SUMO screencast contest? We’ve thought about it a little bit more and decided that it’s going to happen! This is going to be a great opportunity to be creative with new technology while really helping other Firefox users at the same time.

We’ll post more info as we carve out the details on spreadfirefox.com. In the meantime, does anyone know of any good video capturing software that could be used for this? Ideally, it should be free and cross-platform, since we want as many people as possible to be able to participate. We’re aware of the Jing Project for Mac or Windows; are there any other good tools? What’s the best software for Linux?

Attendees: djst, np, nkoth, cww, zzxc, laura

Sumo

• Performance status from laura [1]
  • tiki-wiki_rankings.php does some nasty queries that has been fixed [2]
  • Performance has been improved by roughly 100% (though really it has just gone from terrible to bad)
  • The reason why we’re using tiki-wiki_rankings.php is to allow some basic KB browsing functionality. What we really want is a more thought out way of browsing it, using e.g. a tag cloud that allowed you to browse per tags
    • tiki-browse_freetags.php might be a useful start
• Weekly metrics [3]
• Interface l10n ETA this week [4] — lots of localizers are asking for this
• Suggested day for SUMO Day 2: Friday, May 16th. Works for djst, np, nkoth, cww, and zzxc.

Forums

• 1053 threads last week
• Until we get a proper tracker feature to know what things to document in the KB, we’ll use a thread in the contributor’s forum
• Some patches waiting for review. New patches waiting for np’s computer to become un-busted.

Live Chat

• Last week cww and zzxc answered the majority of the help requests. Trainee helpers have been around, but not many have stayed long enough to allow us to approve them as independent helpers
  • Not a problem with a too lengthy approval process; rather a problem with too few helpers to be around to guide trainees
• We have thought before about focusing the next SUMO Day on helping users, rather than specific items like adding screenshots or editing articles
  • Probably easier to get people behind the idea of helping users, rather than improving articles
  • Would give more focus to Live Chat and the forum
• New 10 min timeout seems to be helping
• Don’t seem to have any sort of extra interest for the trial European shift, though there are a lot of users finding us at 11am PDT
• Openfire Enterprise is now open source[5]
  • The majority of active Jive development is going on SparkWeb, but it’s lacking Fastpath functionality so we can’t switch. Would be nice to use a web based solution — less of a burden for people to join, and cross-platform

I said before that the SUMO Day was a success, and wanted to provide some highlights to better illustrate it:

• More than 80 articles in the Knowledge Base were edited or created during that single day. That’s about three times the amount of work done during a typical full week!
• A lot of work was spent on improving our documentation for contributors, such as how to add screenshots, how to translate articles, etc. This is an important part of making it easier to get involved with SUMO.
• With more than a few eyes on the Firefox 3 product help articles, we were able to finalize and freeze the content so localizers can start to update their translations in time for the release.
• Many people, both within MoCo and the community, joined the #sumo IRC channel and helped making the day both fun and productive. Since that day, there has been more activity in #sumo — it feels more like a community now, which is simply awesome.

So, while the day indeed was a success, we think we can do better next time. Some thoughts and ideas that popped up:

• We should make it easy to track what is being done during the day, and encourage people to tell us what they’re working on. This would give everyone a better overview of what’s going on, and we could more easily give credit where credit is due. Maybe something as simple as a wiki page would be sufficient for this.
• For the next SUMO Day, it might make sense to approach people outside the traditional Mozilla community news/blog channels. After all, the SUMO project offers something for almost everyone to get involved with, regardless of interests or skills.
• We must offer even better documentation. Although the first SUMO Day really helped improving our documentation on things like translating articles and writing OS or Firefox version specific content, we’re still not integrating it well enough on the site. Ideally, you should never have to ask yourself “Where can I find more info on how to use x?” because that info should be where you expect it to be, when you need it. For example, if you click on “Translate this page,” you should see links to the translation documentation right on the translation page.

Thanks again to everyone who helped us out during the SUMO Day, and to everyone who continues to log in to #sumo to provide feedback, share knowledge, and ask questions.

We’ve been thinking a lot lately about creative ways to grow the SUMO community. Of course, this has constantly been hot topic within the SUMO team since we really depend on a vibrant community in order to be successful. More recently, Seth from the evangelism team has added to the think pool with his incredible coolness and wisdom. One idea that has come up a few times now is to launch a contest (yep, yet another one!) that would encourage people to contribute and have fun at the same time, while competing for glory and fame.

Let’s say we’d launch a contest about creating videos (also known as screencasts) for the most popular Firefox support articles. Those who created the best screencasts would see their videos used in the knowledge base articles, get credited for it, and why not also awarded with e.g. a cool Firefox 3 t-shirt? Maybe we could even award the best overall video with a grand prize?

We’re really just brainstorming here. If you’re interested in SUMO or perhaps already involved with the project, we’d love to hear your thoughts on this! The basic idea is to drive more participation, improve the content on SUMO, and have fun at the same time. The thing is that Firefox 3 will be released pretty soon now, so if we were to launch such a contest, we’d have to do it sooner rather than later. What do you think?

This week and next week (April 16th to 25th) I’ll be leading a “trial” shift from 10am to 12pm PDT (19:00 to 21:00 CEST) to give our European community a chance to help users through Live Chat. At this time we can only provide support in English,  and of course you don’t have to be European to help out during these hours.

These hours won’t be added to the official hours just yet, as we’re trying them out, so you don’t have to worry about being overwhelmed by lots of requests.  At the same time, whenever we open we always get some users looking for help, so there should still be chats to go around.

If you’ve already checked us out but the current hours don’t work for you, please stop by.  If you’re new and have been waiting for a chance to try us out, read here to find out what you need to get started.

Attendees: djst, cilias, np, nkoth, Cww, zzxc, myles7897

Sumo

• SUMO Day was a success!
  • Lots of people getting together in #sumo
  • Great feedback from localizers and community members
  • Helped increasing the awareness and engagement within the Mozilla community
  • Lots of fun while doing it :)
• Performance status [1] via e-mail from Laura:
  • Solved the include loop problem that caused the netapp to panic. We’ll get that into testing. [2]
  • Working on the database layer rewrite, basically done with the PDO aspects [3] [4]
  • Need to chat with oremj about the load testing and see how that’s looking [5]
• Weekly metrics [6]
• l10n freeze for in-product — need to announce and provide diffs and instructions for localizers
  • cilias will help providing a list of diffs; djst will post announcement
  • Next step is to focus on localizing the UI. Received feedback from several localizers requesting a simple way to translate all strings in one single text file; should make that possible.

Knowledge Base

• SUMO Day was a huge success for the Knowledge Base
  • More than three times the number of modified articles (ca 90 articles)
  • New tutorials: Editing articles and Adding screenshots
• Bugzilla: 5 new article request bugs [7], 3 article requests fixed [8]
• New How to Contribute page [9] targeted more towards new or potential contributors
  • Contributor Home Page to become more of a portal for experienced contributors, with more info aimed towards helping people help
• 185 total contributors (67 new) when counting all locales

Forums

• SUMO Day didn’t affect the forums much. We might have done a poor job of promoting it, and between the two direct user support offerings (forum and live chat), live chat was framed as the more interesting of them.

Live Chat

• Sumo day went well, not a lot of new contributors, but a handful of good ones who are already involved with the community; let’s hope they stick around
• Status update - The queue timeout issue has been fixed. Chase directed me to a setting I hadn’t seen before. Users should now be able to wait in the queue for 10 min before being redirected. The average wait time should thus make a big jump next week, and the number of unanswered chats should drop (comments added to those fields on the spreadsheet).
• Will publicly add a new “trial” shift for European times, 10am PDT to 12pm PDT (19:00 - 21:00 CEST), though users looking for help at this time seem to be North Americans, will see if this changes

Seth Bindernagel wrote an excellent post about his experiences when helping us out during last week’s SUMO Day. He chose to focus mostly on the Live Chat component of SUMO, and ended up spending quite a bit of his Friday afternoon helping Firefox users out. In his insightful blog post, he touches on some things I think is worth talking a little bit more about.

• Without a healthy Knowledge Base acting as the backbone of our Firefox community support, our Live Chat and forum offerings would never be possible to maintain because of the incredible pressure it would put on the amazing people helping us out. This relationship between the Knowledge Base and the more direct user-to-user support alternatives is important to be aware of. Writing or improving an article in the Knowledge Base not only helps our users — it helps our helpers as well.
• I’ve always maintained that Live Chat and the forum should be considered as the “last resort” support offering from a user’s perspective, simply because of it’s non-volatile and targeted nature compared to the more permanent and distributed resource that our Knowledge Base is. When a user chooses Live Chat or the forum to get help, it should be taken as a sign that the Knowledge Base didn’t contain the solution to the problem, or that the user simply couldn’t find it. With that in mind, you quickly realize how important this “last resort” option is — that’s where the most frustrated users will end up, because they couldn’t find the solution they were looking for.
• Interestingly, many of our most respectable contributors started out by helping out with Live Chat, and later on progressed to become involved with the SUMO project as a whole. Maybe this is because when you help out with Live Chat, you quickly realize the importance of having the answers to the user’s questions available in the Knowledge Base?
• SUMO is a community effort; the fact that many people start out with Live Chat might not be very surprising considering it’s the most social form of user-to-user support — if you exclude walking over to your friends to help them face to face. Maybe it’s the social part of the community that made Seth and many others start with the “last resort” end of SUMO? Maybe that’s a good thing?

In conclusion, I’m really excited to see our SUMO community grow. No matter what your interests are in the project, you’re always welcome to share your ideas with us (or bombard us with hard questions) in the #sumo channel on irc.mozilla.org!

After running the en-US in-product help content through a final review process on SUMO Day last Friday, we’ve now declared the articles good enough to be ready for localization.

Locale leaders: for complete info, including diffs, please see the announcement in the mozilla.dev.l10n.web newsgroup.

Our first SUMO Day last Friday was a success. We’re working on a more complete wrap up of the experience and will post a more fleshed out report soon.

A huge thank you to everyone who joined during the event! You’re all very welcome to stay around in #sumo on a more regular basis — to us, every day is SUMO Day.