SUMO Blog

As the Live Chat community on SUMO (support.mozilla.com) continues to grow, we are working on ways to make the experience even better for Firefox users and for our community members. Live Chat allows us to chat directly with users of Firefox, troubleshooting problems and helping users get the most out of their browser. Our community has been doing a fantastic job over the past few months, handling between 600 and 1000 chat sessions each week. We’re really grateful to everyone who has helped us out, as well as to the numerous community members who have shared ideas for making SUMO even better. As we get ready for Firefox 3.5, we’re working on ways to make Live Chat even more rewarding for both users and for our community.

Last year, we started asking users about their experience when asking a question in either Live Chat or the Support Forum. Each week, approximately half of users who respond say that a chat session already fixed their problem, while another 10% indicate that they will follow up later. The remaining 40% indicate that their problem was not resolved, so we ask these users why we weren’t able to solve their problems. The reasons users pick are graphed below from week to week, along with the people who have solved their problem or will follow up.

Consistently, the top reasons for problems not getting solved have been chat sessions ending early and cases where the helper “was not responding”. Reducing the number of unsolved cases has been a top priority for improving the Live Chat experience. As a result, the SUMO 1.1 release (scheduled for Tuesday, June 2) will fix two bugs that are causing some users to disconnect early, and the next release will focus on allowing users to follow up after a chat session more efficiently. While a user may leave Live Chat before solving an issue, such as to restart Firefox, we want to keep tracking each user via the Support Forum until the issue is resolved. Since only about 10% of users respond that they are using the option to follow up, we also want to make this feature easier to find and use. If we can increase the number of users following up, we will increase the number of people who eventually solve their problem, as well as reduce the need to stay online for lengthy chat sessions.

Looking further ahead, we are developing a web client for Live Chat that will allow community members to participate in Live Chat from anywhere with Firefox. Our goals for the web client include streamlining the process of getting help once a chat session ends, which will increase the number of users we are able to successfully help. We’re also asking the community what we’re doing well and how we can make Firefox Support even more rewarding in a survey that we’re wrapping up next week. Thanks to everyone that has provided feedback and ideas so far! (Thanks especially to Ricardo (ricmacas) for sharing great ideas and design concepts for the Live Chat web client!)

If you’re looking for a way to get more involved with the Mozilla community and enjoy troubleshooting or assisting users, you should consider helping with Firefox Support! Check out the top ways you can make a difference by helping with SUMO. If you have more ideas on how we can make Mozilla Support even more effective and rewarding, we’d love to read your comments on this blog, on our mailing list, or in the Contributors forum.

NOTE: This is the blog version of our about:SUMO newsletter. To subscribe to the email version, sign up using the online subscription form.

about:SUMO

Welcome to about:SUMO — a digest of news from Mozilla’s support world! With this being the first issue, don’t hesitate to send us your feedback on about:SUMO and how we can improve it. Lately, we’ve had a few really important additions, such as the localization dashboard and a new search engine; and next month will be just as good.

• Localization Dashboard
• We’ve switched search engines
• Get ready for screencasts
• Get notified whenever a page in your language is created or edited
• Status update on the knowledge base update for Firefox 3.5
• Looking at writing more concise documents
• Surveys for Live Chat and Forum contributors
• Spend 10 minutes a day doing support
• New and ongoing support issues

Localization Dashboard

In SUMO 1.0, we implemented a dashboard for localizers, so they can get an overview of which pages are most important to translate. It also tracks how much of the knowledge base has been translated. You can view the localization dashboard now!

We’ve switched search engines

One of the new features that was launched in the last SUMO update is a new search engine. By using our own search engine, we can tailor results based on how useful pages are as well as return KB results and forum results together. This not only saves users time, but helps them get the best support in fewer steps. Furthermore, the data from these searches can help us more quickly pinpoint common issues and improve our support resources. You can read more in this blog post.

Get ready for screencasts

We’ve put a lot of effort into adding multimedia to support. The ability to show a person what to do in addition to telling them, makes instructions a lot easier to understand; and some of our most positive knowledge base feedback has been about the existence of screenshots. Soon, we’ll be implementing the ability to add videos (a.k.a. screencasts) to knowledge base articles. We will support both Flash and the open video format called Ogg/Theora, which the upcoming Firefox 3.5 will support natively (without the need of a plugin). For more information, read our recent blog post.

Get notified whenever a page in your language is created or edited

Keeping track of changes to the knowledge base is essential for keeping it up to date; and being notified of changes makes it convenient. In addition to monitoring individual articles, we’ve implemented some tools to make it possible to monitor all knowledge base articles for a specific language, which is something localizers have been requesting. In addition, you can monitor all articles in the “How to contribute” category, or even articles marked for Firefox 3.5. Give it a try.

Status update on the knowledge base update for Firefox 3.5

There is no better time to contribute than now! Firefox 3.5 is going to be released soon, and the entire knowledge base needs to be updated. It’s a giant opportunity to help and get to know Firefox 3.5, so you’ll be able to answer user questions when Firefox 3.5 is released. To get involved, read our Firefox 3.5 support status update.

Looking at writing more concise documents

After website usability expert Neil Lee from the webdev team made a usability audit of the Firefox Support website, there has been a growing movement to make the documentation more concise. By making knowledge base articles easier to read, you can make it helpful to users who might otherwise be less patient reading long-winded instructions.

Surveys for Live Chat and Forum contributors

We’re constantly working to improve SUMO for our contributors as well as our users. As such we’ve sent out surveys to current and recent contributors to get your feedback on how we can make it even more fun and easy to help our users. We really want to hear from you and your comments will help make SUMO even better for everyone. If you didn’t get a copy of the survey, let us know at feedback[at]support.mozilla.com and we’ll e-mail you the link. Stay tuned next month as we go over the results.

Spend 10 minutes a day doing support

One of the quickest and easiest ways to help out Firefox users on SUMO is to answer forum questions. You can do it for as long as you like and whenever you like and it takes just minutes to help out a user. Try helping out for just ten minutes a day and see how easy and fun it is.

New and ongoing support issues

In this section (which will be in every about:sumo newsletter) we’ll be covering one common issue on SUMO for the past month.  This month, one of the top issues was sqlite corruption/locking in the profile folder.  Firefox 3.0 introduced the sqlite database format for places (bookmarks and history) and cookies using places.sqlite and cookies.sqlite respectively.  Unfortunately, these files can sometimes corrupt if Firefox or the computer is shut down improperly.

Another common cause is security software (AVG in particular) detecting tracking cookies or malicious sites in places and locking/corrupting the file when they try to clean them.  When this happens, Firefox can crash on startup, lose or not save bookmarks/history/cookies, have a malfunctioning location bar or return random characters in cookies or bookmark searchs.

Firefox 3.0.11 will have an updated SQLite engine and notifications that will be more resistant to this and alert users.  In the meantime, the steps detailed here for places.sqlite and here for cookies.sqlite will help address this. Watch out for this issue in the forums and on Live Chat and help these users with these steps.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Firefox manual that could be read as a physical book or directly on the screen? Well, guess what: it already exists and even better, it’s completely free!

The FLOSS Manuals Project is changing the way book publishing works by bringing open source concepts to the process. They are engaged in building a platform and community designed to get interesting books published and do it on faster cycles. These people are the reason why we have a Firefox 3.0 Firefox Manual today. Read more about how this manual was created on Chris Hofmann’s blog post FLOSS Manuals: Changing the Publishing World One Book at a Time.

How is this relevant to SUMO? Tomorrow, we are doing a short and focused one-day sprint to do the last but very important steps of cleaning the manual up and make it ready for publishing, and we need your help! Contributing to FLOSS Manuals is as simple as contributing to SUMO and doesn’t require any technical skills.

When?

Tomorrow! Thursday, May 28 at 10 AM Pacific time, 1 PM Eastern time, or 19:00 Central European time. If you’re in Europe or Asia and want to start earlier, you are of course more than welcome to! I’m based in Sweden and will be going through the manual throughout the day.

Where and how?

1. Register to get an account at the FLOSS Manual site.
2. Go to the Write section of the Firefox Manual.
3. Pick a chapter that you want to read, click the “edit” link, and start improving it!

It’s really that simple.

On the right side of the website is a chat window where you will be able to chat with other participants (including me and the SUMO community members Matthew Middleton, Cheng Wang, and Chris Ilias).

What is the goal of tomorrow’s sprint?

We hope to achieve the following things:

• Clean up the language and remove typos, etc.
• Remove inconsistencies
• Verify and make sure all information is correct
• Flag chapters that will need updating for Firefox 3.5, which is quickly getting ready for a release

The last item is important, and we will probably do another one-day sprint shortly to actually update the information to Firefox 3.5 once it is released.

By just getting an account and spending 15 minutes proof-reading one chapter, you will make a huge difference to the quality of the manual, and your name will forever be included in the Credits section of both the online and paperback version.

Hope to see you tomorrow!

It’s been a while since our last post about updating the knowledge base for Firefox 3.5. It’s especially a good time to get involved, now that Firefox 3.5 development is getting close to a release candidate.

We’ve already made great progress! support.mozilla.com has been updated and now supports marking knowledge base content specific to 3.5.  The Options window article and some other articles were then reorganized to make the transition easier.  As a community, we’ve been keeping track of changes to Firefox and many of the new features in Firefox 3.5 already have new articles.  Now, we have to just do to following to finalize the knowledge base:

1. The first thing to do is to through the items on our Updating articles for 3.5 page, and make sure each of those updates is done. If you see one that hasn’t been done, please help make the edit.
2. Thanks to support-conscious developers, relevant changes to Firefox 3.5, have been marked with the keyword “user-doc-needed”. We’d also like your help going through this list of user-doc-needed bugs, and making sure the knowledge base reflects these changes.  Once a change has been made, change the keyword to user-doc-complete and comment in the bug with a link to the documentation.
3. Lastly, we will do a full audit of the en-US knowledge base. It’s a great way to refresh your knowledge of Firefox and isn’t very time consuming. Essentially, it’s just going through each article and asking:
   • Does it apply to Firefox 3.5? If so, the “Firefox 3.5″ category should be check marked in the article editor.
   • Does it need to be updated/changed for Firefox 3.5? If so, update it accordingly, check mark the Firefox 3.5 category for the article, and check mark the “Alert translators” box.
   • Do the screenshots need to be updated for Firefox 3.5? If so, just post to our tracking page, but don’t update the screenshots yet. We will wait until there’s a release candidate and the interface is finalized before adding screenshots.

Once all of that is done, knowledge base localizers should have a solid en-US foundation of changes to translate in time for the Firefox 3.5 release, without having to worry about changes being translated prematurely.

On the whole, most changes revolve around privacy information, tabbed browsing, and small text changes. For user support contributors, now is the time to get acquainted with Firefox 3.5. When Firefox 3.5 is released, there is going to be a large volume of users asking questions about it. It’s the second most wonderful time of the year!

Last Friday, SUMO came out with a brand new search engine. Previously, we’d been using Google to do searches of the knowledge base but this new search engine (based on Sphinx) allows us to get a better control over how the results are returned and ranked.

One other thing that this allows us to do is to return solved threads from the forum and article results from the knowledge base at the same time. While the knowledge base is still the primary resource, the forum also has a wealth of solutions and tips that can help Firefox users and this new search engine allows us to provide all this information from a single results page. We can also refine search results based on what terms are commonly searched and take advantage of tiki-wiki tags to make it even more useful.

This new search is still in its early stages so be sure to check it out and let us know what you think! A lot of thanks to everyone involved in coding, testing and deploying the new engine as well as fixing all the other bugs that went into SUMO 1.0.2.

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Data is still being collected, but sqlite corruption issue (and tag in Live Chat) looks like the most common specific issue
    • 3.0.11 will have a new version of sqlite and will hopefully improve the situation significantly
    • See bugs [1] and [2]

Knowledge Base

• Chris is Canadan; we don’t get an update. :(

Forum

• Same problem as last week: lack of Quarantine made our answer rate drop significantly

Live Chat

• The community survey about participation launched on Thursday, I will be blogging about some early results this week (Wednesday?)
• Metrics update: There were 2 new contributors last week, with 20 total people helping.
  • The number of hours open has been calculated wrong in some prior weeks, so the data on chats per hour is wrong. These numbers will be corrected this week, most weeks showed about 3 extra hours of being open.
• Work on the live chat web client has started. (There should be a demo ready to try within a few weeks)
  • zzxc to post about the progress in Contributor forum shortly
• List of top chat tags from last week (219 total)
  • User experience and data corruption issues most common
  • Working on better tag reporting (see draft UI)
• The data showing how many hours the live chat queue was open each week was calculated wrong in prior weeks. Most weeks showed live chat being open around three hours more than it was actually open. This data will be corrected this week.

Roundtable

• Support Firefox Day will be using open video, shooting for June 11th (Week after RC release… will push if RC pushes)
  • Cww has been discussing with Asa and it looks like we can pull it off from the Mozilla HQ in Mountain View
  • Downside is that due to bandwidth and performance issues, it will be problematic to broadcast from other places than the Mozilla HQ
  • This is a good opportunity to encourage people in the SUMO community to upgrade to 3.5 and help providing support to our users
  • Air Mozilla is using Mibbit – we’ll use it as well

As we constantly try to improve the support experience for both Firefox users and the wonderful contributors who help them, it’s good to take time to see how we’re doing. As such, we just launched a series of surveys asking our contributors about how they use the forums and live chat, what we’re doing well and where we can make improvements. You should have gotten an e-mail from us with your survey link. Please take the time to fill it out — it’ll take only a couple minutes and will really help us in making support fun and rewarding for everyone.

If you’re interested in support or SUMO and didn’t receive an e-mail, just let us know your e-mail address and we’ll be sure to have a survey sent out ASAP.

I wanted to share a good example of how Firefox Support wasn’t just launched to fill the support need of our 270+ million Firefox users, but also to allow us to quickly discover new or emerging issues and escalate them so they reach the attention of the right people.

The background of this story is the problem many Firefox users experienced with anti-virus program BitDefender a few weeks ago, where BitDefender would quarantine one of Firefox’s program files — nssutil3.dll — treating it as a malicious trojan.

In September last year, Asa Dotzler initiated an effort to better monitor our marvelous world wide web for emerging during new Firefox releases to detect possible new problems with Firefox quickly. This is now known as the Release Rapid Response Team, or RRRT for short — and SUMO is an important part of it.

On the morning of April 17, our SUMO Live Chat administrator and general genius Matthew was anchoring the Friday morning Live Chat shift. In this shift, many Live Chat helpers were getting support requests from users with BitDefender. Matthew then filed a bug, alerted the RRRT, and set up a canned message so helpers could quickly respond.

A quick search in the support forum showed quite a few threads, so Cheng Wang, chemist, IRC hacker, and administrator of the support forum, set up “sumobot” in irc.mozilla.org channel #sumo to alert us whenever forum threads were posted with “nssutil3″ or “bitdefender” in them, so we could quickly respond to those threads.

The first things we were telling users were that it was not actually a trojan and that we were working with BitDefender to figure out the false positive. SUMO contributors Noah and Quarantine deserve lots of props for making sure every thread about this issue got a quick response!

We had constant contact with Tomcat from QA, and Kev Needham, who hunted down BitDefender to get a first hand update about the situation. We were all in constant communication over IRC, so as soon as BitDefender released an update, we knew about it.

Once we got confirmation that the newest BitDefender fixed everything, Cheng posted to the bug and we were set. The whole thing was solved in less than 2 hours, which is amazing!

Many thanks to everyone on Live Chat for handing this on that end — these people really were pulling those chats out of the queue fast: noah, tmz, codylg13, dat, mzz, starpluck, leo, SliderMan, collin1000, and CoMpAnY.

A couple of weeks after this happened, I had the fortune to sit down in a conference room with Ken Kovash in Mountain View to discuss SUMO metrics. In this discussion, Ken helped me with setting up so we can see trended search terms on the website — search terms that are most rapidly changing in frequency in the last few days. So, rather than just looking at the most popular search terms on support.mozilla.com (which is almost always “bookmarks” and “clear history”), we can now also see trended search terms.

Ken and I looked back on the stats for April 17 and guess what? nssutil3.dll was at the top of the list! So now we have an even stronger zoom on our periscope lens in the ongoing hunt for problems on the web.

Expect to see this added to the Weekly Metrics shortly.

about:SUMO the SUMO newsletter is coming! You can subscribe now. If you are not actively involved in SUMO, but are still interested in knowing what is going on in the SUMO world, this is a great way to keep in the know. Just use the online subscription form.

We have been meeting individually with active Support localizers to get their feedback and look at ways we can improve SUMO for them. In the latest update to SUMO, we were able to implement many website software changes that addressed localization feedback. Some examples:

• The Localization Dashboard helps localizers track how much of the site is localized in their language, and view which pages are the most important to translate.
• It is now possible to get notifications when a article edit in their locale is need of review.
• We fixed many website software bugs that were making it difficult to localize.

There is still more we can do, which we plan on addressing soon, such as:

• Listing the differences between Contributors, Approvers/Reviewers, and Locale Leaders, and publishing what permissions each group has, as well as listing who is in each group. This helps contributors identify who the leaders of each community are, and who to contact if they have questions or requests from the leaders of their locale.
• Making it clear what is different in SUMO as opposed to other wikis. Some communities have their own sites, and many contributors are already familiar with other systems. This creates an expectation of how SUMO works, and confusion when SUMO does not work they way they expect. Examples of common causes of confusion from community members include tikiwiki markup, the staging and review system, how article translations work, and how to create/remove the “Content may be out of date” warning.

We’ve been keeping a summary of all l10n feedback on wiki.mozilla.org, so you can take a look if you’re interested. If you are a SUMO localizer, and would like to meet with us, just contact us on this blog or post in the Contributors forum. We’re always willing to meet with you!