SUMO Blog

Last week, I blogged about our plan to split the Options window article, and that we need Firefox Support locale leaders to translate a text file for us.

Thank you to Pavel Cvrček (Czech), Cláudio Esperança (Iberian Portuguese), marsf (Japanese), Simone Lando (Italian), Tatjana Jevsikova (Lithuanian), and Wim (Frisian) for sending in their translations. The six of you are awesome!

For those who have not yet translated it, just translate this text file and send it to me. For more information on the plan to split the Options window article, read about it on wiki.mozilla.org.

Activity in the SUMO has increased rapidly over the past year and our community has really grown! Now we have this blog, a contributors forum and a newsgroup. There’s all sorts of work being done with users, finding common issues, writing help documentation and developing the many features on the website and tons more in the works in Bugzilla. With all this stuff going on, naturally, we figured a twitter feed would be a great way of letting community members know about things as-they-happen — in short 140-character bites. The feed will announce blog posts and discussion threads that may be of broader interest as well as give announcements that may be useful to SUMO contributors such as new KB articles, common issues or just to give a welcome to new people.

This is still very experimental and we’d love to get some feedback as to what you want to hear about. Either way, it’s casual, it’s informative and hopefully, it’s also a fun way to keep up to date with all the great things going on in the wide world of SUMO support.

If you’re new to twitter, it’s a webapp that lets users quickly update others with short messages and statuses. If you already have an account, just go to the moz_sumo page and click Follow! and you’ll be updated as to all the great things going on in the world of SUMO. If you would rather not get twitter, you can always subscribe to the RSS feed in your favorite reader or with a live bookmark and follow things right in your browser.

Attendees: djst, cilias, cww, zzxc

Sumo

• Takeaways from the January 12 community meeting
  • Why do people participate — enjoying the community feel
  • People seem to enjoy being able to share ideas and get immediate response
  • We should do this more often
  • cilias was surprised about the community aspect being the main drive for people, tended to think that support is the thing that brings people together.
    • djst can only speak from his own experiences but for him it was definitely the feeling of being part of the community that was the strongest motivator. that and the feeling of giving something back to Mozilla.
• Q1 2009 goals — we have more goals in total, but here are some of the highlights and our main focuses:
  • Improve website performance (SUMO 0.9)
  • Clear l10n dashboard (SUMO 1.0)
  • UI/UX polish (SUMO 1.1)
  • Update Knowledge Base for Firefox 3.1 (cilias)
  • Optimize SUMO start page for finding solutions to problems using manual A/B tests (djst/chofmann/jslater)
  • Host another fantastic Support Firefox Day (cww)
  • Establish biweekly communication with Live Chat and Forum community members for better outreach (principally zzxc)
• Weekly metrics
  • No CSAT data for the KB in the doc because of Omniture problem. Cww to file bug about. cilias to help with collecting it once it’s up again in Omniture
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • The status “Needs doc” means we need to file a KB Article bug to get the documentation writing going. zzxc and cww to file bugs for the items in the list.

Knowledge Base

• Options window sub-articles have been pushed to KB, and articles linking to it have been updated. Next step is to get them localized. We have around 20 translations today; out of those 5 localizers have responded. cilias to blog about the process and cross-post in the l10n newsgroups.
• New Czech and Vietnamese locale leaders. Welcome Pavel Cvrcek (JasnaPaka) and NGUYỄN-Mạnh Hùng (loveleeyoungae)!
• Locked places help-topic should be working in all its glory. Any update on streamlining the solution? cilias to cc some devs to the article for review. We might want to condense it to make it easier to follow for users (e.g. just keep the last resort solution).
• Found a critical bug regarding SHOWFOR versions detection, which is most likely the cause of some articles have a low understandability rating. bug 474842

Forum

• Thread rename policy — Ask moderators to actively rename? Or rename retroactively?
  • djst suggests we should rename titles that need clarification. Generally, we should always strive to make the information finding as straightforward as possible, both for contributors and users. If the thread title is vague, we should clarify it.
• Should we have standardized answers for “monkey article” questions? (In particular cookies.sqlite, places.sqlite and using about:config to customize the awesomebar.)
  • Canned responses integrated to the forum response window would be nice, but we simply don’t have the resources for it (and it’s not very high up in our priority list). Generally in forums, new members tend to look at what the veterans are doing. We should be thankful that we have kickass helpers like Cor-el leading the way and posting helpful responses already!
• bug 472310 preventing threads from showing on the first page, patch almost ready, will be fixed in 0.8.2

Live Chat

• Metrics update
  • 21 new accounts last week (3 helped in at least one chat, 2 approved into support workgroup)
  • About 6 active participants per week, but putting in more hours than previously
  • Traffic and participation still up
  • Of 697 questions, 11 were from Firefox 3.1 beta users
• Disconnections continue to be a big problem; some users took 4+ tries to stay connected. (471456)

Roundtable

• Twitter is up at http://twitter.com/moz_sumo cww to tweet interesting discussion threads in Contrib forum and support.planning as well as every blog post. cww to announce it on the SUMO blog.

Hi folks! Earlier this week, there was another update to support.mozilla.com, I’d like to tell you about. This update was tagged as SUMO 0.8.1.

• The Vietnamese localization has now been enabled, and we welcome NGUYỄN-Mạnh Hùng, who will lead the Vietnamese Firefox Support effort.
• Contributors may have noticed that after login, you are now taken to the Contributor Home Page. This should give all contributors easier access to contributor tools, such as documentation, latest knowledge base edits, latest contributor discussions, and contributor news.
• Uploading images to knowledge base articles has been changed to fix some localization and security issues. You now have to upload an image before adding it to an article; and adding an image is done by picking a thumbnail in the article editor. For more information on adding images, see Editing articles.
• On Live Chat, there was a bug in which trainees could not be invited to new chat sessions; and it really hampered the training process. That bug is now fixed.
• The Forums also had a major bug, in which trying to view forum thread older than two weeks produced an error message. That bug has also been fixed, so users running a forum search can now read any discussion in the search results.
• The much anticipated new search engine has been in testing, and quite a few backend changes were made to prepare for the launch. We’re close to switching to the new search engine!

You can see a full list of SUMO 0.8.1 bug fixes in Bugzilla. Remember that if you see any bugs on support.mozilla.com or you think of a great new feature for the web site, please let us know about it in the Contributors Forum or file a bug in Bugzilla.

This month marks the one year anniversary of the launch of Live Chat as part of the SUMO project. During our first year, over 20,000 chat requests were answered by over 200 community members, ranging from new Firefox users to software developers. Live Chat is unique both in its ability to troubleshoot new issues quickly and provide a way for people to get interactive help with the instructions in the knowledge base. Live Chat contributors were able to help the Mozilla QA community quickly diagnose new issues after Firefox releases, as well as find parts of the SUMO knowledge base that needed to be updated. Congratulations and a huge thank you to all the community members who made our first year such a big success!

As we begin the new year, we are working to resolve some of the outstanding Live Chat bugs and on collecting data to see how well Live Chat is solving users’ issues. Last month, SUMO 0.8 introduced support for user satisfaction feedback at the end of each Live Chat session. The data from these surveys, along with all the other metrics from SUMO, is updated weekly on our Weekly Metrics page.

Of the 20% of users who answer the Live Chat survey, around 50% say that their problem was solved, and another 10% say they are planning to follow up after ending the chat session. Of the remaining 40% who respond that their problem was not solved, over 50% answer that the chat session ended before it was finished. Based on this feedback, we are focusing Live Chat development for the SUMO 0.8.2 and 0.9 releases on reducing disconnections and helping users follow up when they do lose their connection. To prevent situations in which too few contributors are available to answer the questions in the queue, we will be changing the queue behavior to automatically close when there are too many questions for the number of helpers.

Future development efforts will focus on improving the experience for helpers, primarily by transitioning to a web-based client for Live Chat contributors. We are looking for ideas on how to develop this web client and integrate it with SUMO – this will be discussed in an upcoming blog post, so stay tuned! If you can program in Java and want to contribute to the Live Chat project, feel free to submit a patch for any of the remaining unassigned bugs.

A last note of interest, Jammer400, who started helping with SUMO last July, had the privilege of answering the 20,000th live chat session in December. The 20,000th question was from a Firefox user who wanted an extension to access page zoom from the toolbar. Congratulations to Jammer400 for hitting this milestone, and to all the other contributors who helped us reach it! If Live Chat sounds like fun, we would love to have you be part of the project. You don’t need any special experience to get involved – see the Live Chat documentation for details on how to get started.

Attendees: mzz, Quarantine, zzxc, cilias, kbrosnan, Tanner, Cww, underpass, michro, myles7897, tom06, Jammer400 (came late)

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Malware (redirected searches, popups, etc) are starting to be a bigger problem.

Roundtable

• Introductions

• Wrapup of past year and SUMO thoughts
  • LiveChat 20K Questions in one year!
  • From the Italians community: SUMO is a great project and we’ve solved lots of KB problems and bugs (especially in terms of localization over the past year)
  • Forum: major issue (outside of lack of contributors) is that tikiforum format is different from phpBB and can be perplexing to people used to it, also search is making it difficult for users and threads fall off the top page too fast.

• The SUMO community
  • Where contributors come from: Most from word of mouth, #firefox, very few from the how to contribute page. Italian localizers mentioned the difficulty in getting people who weren’t already big contributors in mozillaitalia to contribute to SUMO.
  • Improve the community in terms of attracting non-en users. How?
  • How do we best communicate known issues so that contributors know what’s going on during server breakdowns and/or know when fixes are coming down the pipeline.
  • What do contributors follow in terms of communication channels: almost everyone follows the blog (most via planet) and some follow the newsgroup as well, see also this survey, question 16
  • The sumo blog:
    • don’t be too frequent, bug fixes/releases are good. About:sumo newsletter may incorporate minutes and other things. Lists of KB articles that need work may be nice.

• Goals for 2009
  • Here is djst’s vision for SUMO:
    • The vision for SUMO – Part 1: Listen as hard as we can
    • The vision for SUMO – Part 2: Understanding the bigger picture
    • The vision for SUMO – Part 3: Increasing community participation
    • The vision for SUMO – Part 4: Having our finger on the pulse
    • The vision for SUMO – Part 5: Localization
    • The vision for SUMO – Part 6: Knowledge Base
    • The vision for SUMO – Part 7: Support Forum
    • The vision for SUMO – Part 8: Live Chat
  • Always need more contributors
  • What makes you as a contributor stay around:
    • People on IRC/in forums are friendly and fun to be around
    • It’s a worthwhile project/good browser
  • Ideas for fun things:
    • Twitter feed?
    • Have a voice call more frequently?
      • Have meetings more open and make sure people feel comfortable voicing opinions, maybe not special meetings
    • Mozilla community project
    • Does this distract from SUMO?

• Making helping easier
  • Problems with getting Livechat contributors to work on the KB also: it seems hard to get started on the KB. What if we made the KB have more “unapproved/informal” content that contributors can see? Better article editor?
  • Make an extension for sharing notes/snippets/weekly common issues for forum users/live chat/kb article writing… may not need to be this complicated. Use unapproved KB articles?
  • An about:support extension for users so it’s easier to get lists of extensions/plugins/useragent. — mzz is on this. Has limited value as an extension (won’t work in safe mode, most extension users are more advanced) but is a good proof of concept for maybe being built into Firefox proper.

• Firefox 3.1
  • Support for 3.1 is here: See this blog post and this article and this wiki doc. New 3.1 category in Thursday’s push.
  • Perhaps we should sit down with a fresh install and brainstorm the major user changes that may confuse/upset users (like the Smart location bar in 3.0).

• Open Discussion
  • Should we do this more often? (That is have an explicit meeting for contributors?)
    • General consensus is yes, but shorter.
    • Monthly? Different time zones? Pre-submit topics for smoother flow?

As we fully embrace the concept of an entire knowledge base acting as the Firefox manual when you click on Firefox Help, there are some structural changes to the help documentation imported from CVS. By far, the biggest and most notable change is in the Options window reference.

The Options window reference is our biggest article. It is already beyond our size limit for screenshots, without screenshots for secondary option windows (e.g. Fonts, Advanced JS, Languages, Warning messages, etc.). The markup is very complicated, because it contains both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0 content, and will contain Firefox 3.1 content. Updating it for Firefox 3.1 is hard to do because of the size and complexity of the markup.

For Firefox 3.1, we would like to split up the Options window reference into sub-articles (one article for each panel). The parent article would include a link to each sub-article, along with a description of each panel, which will also appear at the top of each sub-article. Each sub-article should have a link back to the parent article at the bottom.

This wouldn’t be difficult, if it weren’t for one thing: The actual Options window panels in Firefox each have a [Help] button, which links straight to each section of the Options window article. These are called help-topic links. If a translation of the Options window article has not been split into sub-articles when we update the help-topic link URLs, those help-topic links will not work for that locale (They will actually fall back to the English versions). We need to make sure all translations of the parent article are split, before updating help-topic links.

In order to lessen the workload on localizers, we evaluated how much of this plan we can do ourselves. Basically, what we need is the new text translated. The actual implementation can be done by us. I’ve created a text file, containing all the text that needs to be translated.
Firefox Support locale leaders should translate this text file, and send the translation to me.

If you want to implement it yourself, that would be appreciated; but it should be noted if you are a Firefox product localizer, any work on Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 should be done before this. For more information on the Support changes for Firefox 3.1, details are on wiki.mozilla.org.

A few days ago, we blogged that we’ll be having a contributors meeting Monday Jan 12th. I just wanted to write this to say that I’m really excited to hear what everyone has to say about improving SUMO in 2009. We’ll be discussing the year past but focusing on the year ahead. So everyone bring your ideas, thoughts, and brilliant plans! A quick reminder about the meeting:

Monday Jan 12th 2 PM PST/5 PM EST/10 PM GMT:

• California: 650-903-0800 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toll-free (US): 800-707-2533 then password 369, conference number 280#
• Skype (free worldwide): +18007072533 then password 369, conference number 280#

The backchannel (where we post links and share text) is #sumo on irc.mozilla.org and our agenda and notes is on the Mozilla wiki.

If you can’t make the time, never fear, just tell us your thoughts in IRC at any time or come to one of our weekly phone meetings Mondays at 10 AM PST/1 PM EST/6 PM GMT.

This Monday, Jan 12th, we’ve moved the regular SUMO meeting and are inviting all SUMO contributors to call in to discuss their thoughts on the SUMO project.  Volunteers, contributors and helpers are a vital part of the SUMO community and we wanted to make sure that there was time set aside some time to hear your views on what we as a community can do.  SUMO isn’t just for users of Firefox, it’s also our community.  Most importantly, this meeting is a chance to get together and bounce around ideas and thoughts about how to make SUMO even better.

The call is scheduled to go from 2 PM PST/5 PM EST/10 PM GMT  and last for about 90 minutes (although we’ll certainly keep it freeform and extend it if needed).  Here are some things that we are looking to cover:

1. A quick wrapup of the past year: Knowledge base, Forums, Live Chat, Support Firefox Days.   What happened, (SUMO got started!) and what you felt went well/could have been done better.
2. Goals for 2009.  What do you want to see from SUMO over the next year and what projects would you like to take a lead on?
3. Firefox 3.1.  Mozilla Firefox 3.1 is being released soon and so SUMO will have to expand its coverage.  We’ll talk briefly about the major changes that users will be seeing and answer questions about what is happening on our end to prepare for it.
4. Open discussion about SUMO (on whatever you want).

That’s all that we have planned.  If you’re interested in improving SUMO or working more in-depth in user support, this is the perfect place to get started.  If you can’t make this meeting or want to get even more involved, feel free to join us for any of our weekly meetings which are Mondays at 1 PM EST/10 AM PST.  (You’re always welcome to join!)

Phone call details (pick one):

• California: 650-903-0800 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toll-free (US): 800-707-2533 then password 369, conference number 280#
• Skype (free): +18007072533 then password 369, conference number 280#

The backchannel (where we post links and share text) is #sumo on irc.mozilla.org

I hope to see you all there.

Cheng.

Note: We’ll be moving the start of LiveChat hours for Monday to after this meeting so there won’t be any conflict.

Welcome to the future everyone! This is 2009, the year of opportunities and, if we’re lucky, a stronger world economy. Earlier this week — well, last year — I was writing about the accomplishments we made with SUMO as a project, a team, and a community in 2008. Now I’d like to spend some time to talk about our plans for 2009.

Back in September last year, I was writing a series of blog posts about what I called the vision for SUMO, which was largely based on ideas and suggestions from our vibrant SUMO community. For your reading pleasure, here’s the full list of blog posts:

• The vision for SUMO – Part 1: Listen as hard as we can
• The vision for SUMO – Part 2: Understanding the bigger picture
• The vision for SUMO – Part 3: Increasing community participation
• The vision for SUMO – Part 4: Having our finger on the pulse
• The vision for SUMO – Part 5: Localization
• The vision for SUMO – Part 6: Knowledge Base
• The vision for SUMO – Part 7: Support Forum
• The vision for SUMO – Part 8: Live Chat

This blog series wasn’t meant to remain just a vision. In fact, in 2009 we’re making it our goal! We’ve actually already started — the latest 0.8 release includes a number of significant achievements — but there’s much left to be done. Since the vision for SUMO was published, we’ve prioritized the individual goals and created an aggressive timeline that we’re confident will address many of the concerns we’ve heard from our community.

So without further ado, here is our ambitious development roadmap for SUMO in 2009!

It’s not easy to plan a detailed and accurate roadmap a whole year ahead, and as such not everything is set in stone yet. We’d love to hear what you think of our plans for 2009 and whether we’ve missed something you find important.

Also, we will definitely need more development manpower in order to pull this off. If you’re interested in helping out and have PHP experience, let us know or, even better, submit a patch to one of our 350+ open bugs!