Regarding suggestions, one thing I was surprised to find out when talking to Cheng Wang at the Mozilla summit is that there’s no way to see how much time a volunteer has contributed to helping people. One big benefit of volunteering to contribute to a written article is that you have something tangible that you’ve contributed to the community, which others can see and thank you for; when it comes to live chat, though, the only way for me to find out that Cheng had dedicated countless hours of his time to LC was by asking him.

So I think that having a “leaderboard” showing/ranking how contributory volunteers have been, along with perhaps public comments left for them by people they’ve helped or worked with (as you mentioned in your post) could both be useful as a way to provide transparency and accountability, while also providing a social incentive to encourage more people to join in.

Our search function is definitely one of the things we’re focusing on next. In fact, we are using Google today, but it’s not working very well for us. We’d like to better integrate the KB and forum search, making sure we can weight articles independently to make sure new and critical issue get promoted in the search results, and many other things. That said, if you can show examples of when a site specific Google search on SUMO is better than the search bar in SUMO itself, I’d be interested in seeing that to get a better understanding of what’s going on.

About your contributor’s forum thread, I think you did exactly what you should do there, which was to raise the issue and check what the next step should be for something that is frequently (or seemingly frequently?) reported. We’ve just recently started to compile lists of which issues are indeed the most frequently reported ones, based on stats from the forum, Live Chat, Hendrix, etc (see http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Weekly+common+issues). For any issue that ends up in this list, there should be a Knowledge Base article. In other words, we need to know whether or not it’s actually a common issue before we write a Knowledge Base article about it. Back in June, we had just started to look at these lists so we relied more on anecdotal evidence (e.g. one contributor reading two forum threads about an issue and thinking it’s a frequent issue based on those two threads). We need to make this process more obvious to contributors, to reduce confusion.

Keep the feedback coming, and great to have you trying out SUMO!

In general, I think you have expressed pretty clearly in this post the things I thought could be improved. Despite my being familiar with a whole range of software, including several IRC and IM clients, it took me a while to work out how to use Spark, and I hadn’t quite got to grips with all the fastpath bits after a couple of hours. After a few weeks, I removed it from my system cause I like to keep things tidy and I wasn’t using it.

The other issue I had while doing live support was with the SUMO knowledge base. I’m sure I would get better at finding things on SUMO with time, but actually I’m afraid I found answers more easily with just a Google search, and from that either managed to find a SUMO KB article by refining my search based on the content of the answer I found elsewhere, or by using Google restricted to the SUMO site. The site funnel search needs to be at least as good as the results of a Google search restricted to the site (and if it isn’t, then you could always use a Google search instead…).

Finally (and I mean this to be an example, but it wouldn’t be bad to know about the specific case…) Someone came to live chat with a question, and I found some answers on the forum and an external site. As requested, I noted it in the contributors forum http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=3&comments_parentId=77867 – I am afraid I never followed up on it (sorry about that!). But assuming I never do, shouldn’t there be some way of keeping track of that?

I guess it’s down to better integration, but it should be easier to get from the point I was, finding an answer elsewhere on the web that should be in the KB, to getting it in the KB. I had to ask via chat whether I should be putting a stub in the wiki, filing a bug, or making a post in the forum (is that documented somewhere?). Then I posted in the forum and someone suggested I drafted something in the wiki and then I guess I would go back to the forum to ask for review?