SUMO Blog

Over the past few months, the support team has been working to identify top issues and pass this information along to the rest of the community. For Live Chat, we are now keeping weekly summaries on the Live Chat issue guide, a page that documents common issues both for live chat helpers and for QA team members assisting with live chat. This page is useful for anyone wanting to help with live chat, as it contains a brief overview of the most common questions we get. Information maintained there includes background information on symptoms, links to knowledge base articles, links to troubleshooting explanations, the current status of each issue, and suggested steps to troubleshoot each problem.

In addition to being a guide for new helpers, the issue guide allows everyone to quickly see which information we want to collect from users with specific issues. When helpers discover new information, they can let others know by posting in the Contributors forum or by talking to other helpers in #sumo. In either case, room monitors and administrators make sure that useful information is shared in bug reports or on Weekly common issues.

As I discussed last month, people from all over the Mozilla community can help with Live Chat by assisting helpers with new issues. Anyone can get started with this by joining #sumo on irc and configuring your XMPP (Jabber) client. For QA team members or other community members wanting to assist live chat helpers, the Live Chat issue guide is useful to get a glance at what helpers are seeing. If you know of an emerging issue that we should be investigating, let us know by posting in the Contributors forum.

Since we are able to only directly help a small portion of users in the forum or in live chat, it is important that the knowledge base is kept up-to-date as the primary source for help by ensuring that known solutions are documented there. The majority of frequent issues have documentation which is linked to from the Live Chat issue guide for easy reference. To assist with documenting new issues, each undocumented problem in the issue guide is noted as needing documentation, so that documentation can be created when enough information is received.

For more information about Live Chat, read our documentation on getting started. You can assist other helpers using any XMPP client by following our guide to connecting with alternate clients. (If you want to answer your own Live Chat questions, you will need the open source Spark client.) If you have any problems connecting, join #sumo on irc to get help.

There’s been a discussion in the mozilla.support.planning newsgroup (a place where many of the discussions behind the SUMO project are taking place that for various reasons aren’t happening in the Contributor Forum) about an about:sumo newsletter, similar to how we already have newsletters for Add-ons (about:addons) and the whole Mozilla project (about:mozilla).

SUMO contributor myles7897 originally proposed the idea, and more importantly, created a pretty fantastic mockup of how such a newsletter could look like and include:

We’d like to hear what you think of this idea and whether or not this would be useful to you. The idea is that we would blog about various SUMO related things as we already do, and then collect and package the most interesting bits every month and turn that into this newsletter format.

Thanks to myles7897 for creating the mockup, and to Bubo for proof-reading!