SUMO Blog

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

Sumo

• New theme went live last week — please file bugs if you see any problems (but please search first, as there have been a lot of them filed already!) :)
• 0.6 release this week — Wednesday or Thursday during a downtime window is the plan
• New weekly dev meeting every Tuesday at 9 AM PDT, where we’ll focus on bug triaging, assigning, and milestone planning.
• Weekly metrics
  • Second most searched term is “clear history” — pretty high chance this is about the AwesomeBar. Suggest adding links about it from the Clearing Location Bar results article to make sure people are aware of what they’re seeing

Knowledge Base

• Launch week was the most active week in the KB ever, including both new articles written and number of article edits and contributors
• Bugzilla:
  • Week of Firefox 3: 11 article requests [1], 17 article bugs fixed [2]
  • Last week: 3 article requests [3][4][5], 4 article bugs fixed [6]
• Hoping to unlock in-product articles this week so people can keep improving them. They were locked during l10n string freeze to minimize the workload for localizers, but now it’s time to open it up again.

Forums

• Got stats for the past couple weeks – 5000 threads last week, 3500 this week
• Many new contributors, though some are probably one time users.
• New really helpful contributor: alterna! Over 100 posts already. Welcome alterna! :)

Live Chat

• Still getting a fair number of new accounts post-release
• Several approvals since release
  • maniac, mzz, phreakyphotographer, wolfwindshadow, silentme
  • more should be ready this week
• New hours while Cww is away
• Need to start looking at moving to the open source plug-ins [7]
• Follow-up on pref to add more admin accounts
  • djst to bring this up in tomorrow’s sumo dev meeting
• zzxc (Matthew) and mzz are working on adding Fastpath support to gajim
  • zzxc to document what’s needed from IT and what the plan and progress is
• Lucy be away and unreachable July 9th – 20th – Do we close or can others cover?
  • cilias and np might be able to cover a few shifts. Lucy to send out e-mail with planned hours of operation so we can figure it out.

Attendees: djst, lucy, nkoth, zzxc, cww, Collin_1000

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Significantly increased traffic from Firefox 3, as expected
  • Servers held up generally well (at least not worse than any other service!)
  • Traffic has dropped steadily since launch day, but will definitely increase rapidly again as we start rolling out the automatic updates
  • New calculation of top polls. Previous results were only using the top 30 polls. New results use any en-US articles with over 20 results
  • Can’t load action log screen to get stats
• Firefox 3
  • Generally the approach to escalate common security issues regarding Firefox 3 worked well. See also separate blog post about that.
  • Jason: working on getting stats on most common issues. Tiki not being co-operative.
  • Possible stats:
    • Most visited articles (Urchin)
    • Most voted on articles (Tiki)
    • Most helpful articles, based on number of votes (Tiki)
    • Articles/external URLs linked to most often in forums (Tiki)
• SFD3 feedback
  • The general approach of using a single page hosting both IRC channel for chat, and Mogulus for all workshops worked really well
  • A lot less confusion about where events were hosted, and a lot less work on updating IRC status messages, wiki pages with schedules, etc.
  • Mogulus also gave us the ability to see how many people were participating (up to 45 people!), and people could be logging in before an event started
  • Thanks to Cww for figuring out how Mogulus and desktop sharing worked in Windows, and to Dietrich for doing the same on the Mac!
  • Figuring out the exact time requirements for the individual events can be tricky — should figure out what we can fill the channel with when there’s no live content going
  • In summary, we got around 6-10 more live chat contributors and a few more forum contributors
• Status of Google SoC projects
  • The screenshot annotation project is going really well, with most requirements already fully defined and a student working very hard to always stay ahead of me (djst, the mentor). :)
  • The Search project hasn’t really started yet because the student has been busy with exams, but we have figured out a reasonable scope and will have a meeting with the student this Wednesday. He has pretty solid approaches on the problems so things look promising. nkoth is the mentor.

Knowledge Base

• cilias couldn’t make it to today’s meeting, but we covered the important bits above (important issues with Firefox 3 were looped back into the KB and promoted to the start page)

Forums

• Big thanks to all those who helped in the forum. There were a lot of questions posted, but we got through it well.
• Bo and cor-el now over 10,000 posts!! A huge thanks to these amazing guys.
• Some intermittent bugs with the forum – pages showing up with a different stylesheet, new posts not reflected immediately, can’t delete posts…

Live Chat

• In a normal week, about 300 live chat requests are answered. Last week over 1000 were answered!! Really incredible effort by the community.
• 46 new accounts
• Updated server software to 3.5.2 last night
• Time to start hacking group — people from the Live Chat community are interested in coding. Lucy and djst to approach Jive devs for a good peer reviewer to get us started.
• Lucy to post requirements doc for scheduling software ideas on the wiki

Everyone should head on over to the Support Firefox Day 3 homepage and get in on the action!

Support Firefox Day 3 is focusing on acquainting users with the awesome changes in Firefox 3 and even includes some tips for power users.  Sessions are LIVE and interactive.  Make sure you click “Turn me on” to enable the live video feed, and sign in to #sfd on irc.mozilla.org if you have a question (an client is available in the page if you don’t have your own.)

Schedule (all times GMT -7):

10:30 am PDT – Overview of Firefox 3’s new features with Director of Firefox Development Mike Connor

11:30 am PDT – How to use the Site Identification button and other new security features with Human Shield Johnathan Nightingale

12:30 pm PDT – Bookmarks, History, the Awesomebar and you! with Lead Places Developer Dietrich Ayala

1:15 pm PDT – Tricks for powerusers with Community Program Manager Seth Bindernagel

2:00 pm PDT – All about Firefox 3’s new web-based help with Firefox Support Manager David Tenser, hosted by Keeper of the Knowledge Base Chris Ilias

Followed by an open session:

Helping users with the Firefox Support community. We’ll show you how to get started helping users with problems and troubleshooting problems. Anyone can get started, you don’t have to be an expert!

See you there!

What an amazing launch we’ve had so far! At the time I’m writing this, over 6.5 million people have downloaded Firefox 3, and from a Firefox Support perspective it shows. The majority of the support questions we’ve received the last 20 hours have been about Firefox 3.

This launch was an intensive stress test of our new support system. With any software release, issues can quickly become very frequently reported and need to be escalated. We were on full alert, and had previously setup specific rules for how to handle cases when issues are surfaced. Whenever a major issue was reported multiple times in a high frequency, we would file a “critical” priority bug to get the solution to the problem documented in the Knowledge Base and then seed it into the top 10 article list of the front page.

We had to do that a couple of times yesterday (Firefox 3 upgrade reverts bookmarks and other settings to older version and Firefox 3 will not start on Mac OS X 10.3.9). This is just the beginning, though, and we are continuing our mission for improved support. Jason is working on a list of the most common issues reported so we can hand that over to the development and QA teams. We would also like to figure out exactly how much promoting a common issue to the front page helps us. The relevant data here seems to be the ratio between a specific problem vs other problems, and how that data changes when we promote it to the front page. This is just one of the metrics we would like to have in order to continuously improve SUMO.

With the powerful group of helpful people who teamed up around the SUMO project, we were able to help countless of new users. And we definitely had lots of fun while doing it! Yesterday, I was helping around 15 users using Live Chat. In some of these chat sessions, trainees (hi Koko and Frankieo!) were watching while I was helping the user, in order to give them a taste of how the Live Chat experience is like. After some sessions, we also tried the other way around (me watching/mentoring while the trainees were interacting with the users). All in all, it was a very fun, collaborative, but also challenging experience, and we all learned from it. I hope to see the new trainees again today, and tomorrow!

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all the loyal and incredibly helpful contributors of the SUMO project, and welcome all the new ones. Without your hard work and dedication to Mozilla, we wouldn’t be able to be as responsive to our users as we were. Thank you!

Wow, we’re up at 7 million downloads now! That’s 500,000 new downloads while I was writing this post. Either I’m an extremely slow writer, or people really like Firefox.

The SUMO contributors have all worked incredibly hard to make our user-to-user support experiences for our users positive. Today they will need our help in order to maintain the quality, as the services will explode with new Firefox 3 users. Below are three ways you can make a difference to the hard working contributors as well as our new users.

Even if you only have a few minutes to spare, your effort can help one, two, three, or ten new users.

Super Easy

• Monitor the support forum for unanswered questions — Just browse through the list of questions and see if there is anything you know the answer to. You don’t even have to have an account, although I recommend you get one anyway to show who you are.
• Hang out in #livechat on irc.mozilla.org — Other Live Chat helpers may find you there and ping you to help them out in case they run into a hard question. You don’t have to participate in helping users directly, just answering questions other Live Chat helpers might have.

Relatively Easy

• Help users directly in Live Chat — Actually it’s not that hard, but it’s definitely more time consuming than the other ways of helping out. Read all about how to get started — it only takes 5 minutes! Seth Bindernagel’s blog post on why you should try Live Chat out is definitely worth a read too.

Thanks for considering helping us today! If you have any questions about how you can help out, don’t hesitate to contact us. Find out more on the How to contribute page on support.mozilla.com.

After some serious work by the webdev and IT teams, SUMO is finally in a good enough shape to be linked to from Firefox 3! Thanks a lot to Laura, Jeremy, Justin, Mike Morgan, Mark Smith, Nelson, and Jason for all your incredible work on this. What this means is that you are now taken to SUMO in (hopefully) your language when selecting Help from the menu.

Localizers: it would mean the world to us if you could spend a few minutes to make sure the links to your localized product help work properly. Use the link in the Help menu, and open the Options/Preferences window and click Help from there.

Chris and I wrote a document summarizing all that should be done: Updating product help for your locale. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. Don’t forget to localize the start pages if you haven’t done it already! It’s really easy and only takes five minutes.

Thanks!

Attention SUMO contributors: If you haven’t submitted a screencast for one of our top 100 knowledge base articles yet, today is the perfect day. As you might know, we have been running a contest where we reward one winner per article (up to 100 winners!) with a prize, and the best screencast overall with a grand prize. There are still plenty of chances to win, but you have to submit your screencast before 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time today!

Participating really couldn’t be easier — just pick one of the top 100 knowledge base articles and follow the instructions while recording it with e.g. Jing.

1. Pick an article from the top 100 list
2. Create a screencast for the article
3. Submit your screencast

If you’re one of the 100 winners, your screencast will be used in a Knowledge Base article read by thousands and thousands of Firefox users. Not only will you be rewarded with a prize, you will really make a difference to provide invaluable help for all those users.

Happy filming!

Just a reminder that the Live Chat meeting is today at 12pm PDT/GMT -7 (3pm EDT/GMT -4).

We’ll be discussing any special measures we want to take during release week as well as answering any other questions that come up. Everyone is welcome as this is a great chance to get to know our Live Chat community and to learn a little more about how we work.

Call-in details:

• 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#

Don’t forget, the toll-free number is free from anywhere in the world using Skype! Click on “Call Phones,” choose United States as the country and then dial the number as usual.

If you don’t have a microphone or want to share a link we’ll also be watching #livechat on irc.mozilla.org during the call.

We still need submissions for articles, and what better way to win a limited run t-shirt than by recording a simple video? This t-shirt was considered for Firefox 3, but was set aside with a few others to be used for special events like this.

The Firefox Screencast Contest is open for just five more days, and there are plenty of chances of winning! Now is the time for you to spend ten minutes creating a couple of screencasts for a couple of Knowledge Base articles and win some prizes.

Here’s today’s list of Knowledge Base articles from the Screencast Contest we want you to focus on. These articles either have no submissions or need more to get the best screencast possible. Of course, you’re welcome to create a screencast for anyone of the top 100 articles, but if you pick one of the following articles, you definitely increase your chances of winning as the competition is currently low.

Today’s articles are:

• Backing up your information
• Error loading web sites
• Firefox is already running but is not responding
• Lost Bookmarks
• Configuring Windows Firewall
• Importing

Head over to the Firefox Screencast Contest and submit your screencast! Happy filming!

At the end of Sunday, June 15, we will close the Firefox Screencast Contest, so there are only a few days left for you to submit your screencast.

Want to win? Starting today, we will feature a number of daily Knowledge Base articles from the Screencast Contest that we want you to focus on. These articles either have no submissions or need more to get the best screencast possible. If you pick one of these articles, you definitely increase your chances of winning some prizes as the competition is currently low.

Today’s articles are:

• Configuring AVG Internet Security
• ActiveX (suggested section: Uninstalling the ActiveX plugin on Windows)
• Installing Firefox on Windows
• Basic Troubleshooting
• Firefox cache file was infected with a virus
• Unable to download or save files

I picked one of the articles above, Installing Firefox on Windows, and created a quick screencast for it using Jing. (If you’re new to Jing and screencasts, watch this easy tutorial from Jing’s website)

This is what the result looks like, after a couple of minutes recording the screencast: Watch how to install Firefox on Window

Think you can do better than that? We think so too! For one, it would be better if it included the part of the instructions covering downloading the installation file and save it to your desktop. Are you up for the challenge? The head over to the Firefox Screencast Contest and submit your screencast!