It’s been a really fun and hectic SUMO Day so far, but there is still time for you to join! We’ll be available in #sumo until 6 PM PTD, which means there are almost three hours left of the event. Help us creating screenshots, updating article for Firefox 3, helping users, or find something else that suits you.
We’re waiting for you!
This day is all about getting to know SUMO (support.mozilla.com) and how to use the site to help other Firefox users enjoy their favorite browser — Firefox, that is. 
If you’ve thought about helping out with user support, but haven’t been sure where to start, this day is for you.
For some time now, users have been redirected out of the queue if one of our helpers hasn’t accepted their chat after 4 minutes. Obviously this is a very short amount of time given the number of requests we can get and the fact that we usually only have a handful of volunteers on to answer them. We’ve wanted to raise this limit but haven’t been able to figure out how.
I’ve heard back from Jive support today, and it seems that there was a setting I was overlooking. There are actually several places to set a timeout, but they are defaults that are inherited by new queues. I had to dig in to the queue settings to change this timeout on an existing queue. A very big thank you to Chase from Jive for figuring this out!
As I said this should be fixed now. If anyone still has any problems with dropping from the queue before 10 minutes please let us know, either here or on irc.mozilla.org in #livechat.
Some people may have noticed that the Contributor Tools box on support.mozilla.com is missing. That’s actually because of a new preference in the Account Settings panel, in which you can set whether or not you are a contributor. If you haven’t already seen it, please:
Hearing all the great things about the upcoming Firefox 3 and wishing you’d been a part of it? It’s not too late! Even when all the development and testing is done, there’s still a very important job left. Providing user support can help make sure the release goes smoothly for users who are updating or trying Firefox out for the first time.
The Firefox Support team would like to invite you to our first SUMO day! On April 11th we’ll be hosting a day all about getting to know SUMO and how to use our site to help other Firefox users enjoy their favorite browser. If you’ve thought about helping out with user support, but haven’t been sure where to start, this day is for you.
Our team is gearing up to show you the ropes and answer all your questions. Not only will there be the normal tasks of editing articles, and answering questions in the forums and on chat, but we’re planning special projects that will help you get to know our site, so you can jump right in or get started slowly. We’re also looking for your feedback on what still needs to get better for our community to grow.
And of course, we’re hoping many of you will stick around for release day when you can be the difference between an ordinary internet user and a proud Firefox fan.
Stay tuned for more info. In the meantime, we’d love feedback, ideas, suggestions, comments… Either post a comment in this blog post, or in the SUMO contributor’s forum (you need an account to post there), or in the mozilla.support.planning newsgroup.
Don’t feel like waiting for next Friday? Check out the different ways you can get involved today. We’d love to have you onboard!
With Firefox 3 Beta 5 just released, a lot of people have probably noticed that we’re no longer using the built-in product help, but instead linking to help content on the web. I’d like to take the opportunity to clarify why we did that in case there are people who weren’t aware of the decision, or forgot why it was made in the first place.
First, though, a clarification: what you’re seeing today in Firefox 3 when selecting Help from the menu is just a temporary, static page that acts as a placeholder for the real help content hosted on SUMO. We’re still working on the performance issues that hit us last week, but should soon be able to link to the actual documentation again. We’re also still working on finalizing the English help content so localizers can start translating it. More on that later.
So, why are we moving product help to the web? There are actually several reasons for it, and they’ve even changed over time. To me, the three top reasons are:
Of course, there are other benefits as well, such as the ability to serve richer content like video tutorials, but the three reasons above are definitely the most important ones in my opinion.
One concern/objection I’ve heard a few times is of what use online support is if a user can’t connect to the internet in the first place. Let’s talk a little bit about that. This is indeed a problem, but it’s actually something that has been a problem in Firefox for a long time. Even if Firefox 2 has product help available when the browser is offline, there’s no troubleshooting information for connection problems bundled, so you’re still out of luck if you can’t connect. So my answer to this concern is that it’s more or less moot, since we’re not making the situation any worse by moving Firefox 3 product help to the web (but we’re admittedly not improving it either). Ideally, Firefox should do a simple self-diagnostics when it can’t connect, to determine or suggest the solution to the problem and present that on a page similar to the other in-product error pages. This has been in the plans for a while, but I don’t know about the status of it today.
I hope this gives you a better understanding of why we moved the help back online, and please don’t hesitate to comment here or in the mozilla.support.planning newsgroup if you have any thoughts or questions.
Attendees: djst, cilias, np, Lucy, nkoth, Cww, zzxc, morgamic, laura
Unfortunately, my computer crashed shortly after the meeting, so I lost the meeting notes that I wrote in an unsaved text document. :(
Sumo
Knowledge Base
Forums
Live Chat