SUMO Blog

For the past few weeks we have been gathering a list of changes from Firefox 3.5 to 3.6. The next step is to go through the list of articles and determine which articles need to be updated for each of those changes, and everyone can help. If you want to help updating the knowledge base for Firefox 3.6, here’s what to do:

1. Go through the list of articles.
2. Look for content that needs to be updated according to the changes we have gathered. Some notable changes to look for:
   • The Main preferences panel has been renamed to the General preferences panel, so any references to the Main panel will need to be updated.
   • Thanks to the great work by Curtis Bartley and other Firefox developers, any documentation pointing users to their profile can be updated to make use of new about:support page. (e.g. “Open the Help menu and select Troubleshooting Information…. In the resulting page, click Open Containing Folder.)
3. For each change in Firefox, list the article that need to be updated on this wiki page.

In a couple of weeks, once we have got a good idea of the affect each change has on our documentation, we can then decide which updates can be automated. If you have any questions, just ask in the Contributors forum thread. Thank you!

Facebook has become an extremely popular social network the last couple of years — and we all know how quickly Firefox is growing its market share. Therefore, a little deductive reasoning tells us that many people must use Facebook with Firefox.

Last month we started to see a large increase in the amount of Firefox users having problems with Facebook. To help those users, we created a knowledge base article specifically for problems with Facebook. However it is a very generic article that suggests general troubleshooting solutions. Facebook users are having specific problems, like not being able to enter text in their status, or Facebook chat not working.

We would like to improve the article by listing each problem and its corresponding solution, but we’ve had some difficulty pinpointing the specific solution for each problem. Maybe one or two Facebook applications are causing a certain issue?

If you have experienced any problems in Firefox when using Facebook, we’d like to hear from you! Post whatever information you can provide in this Contributors forum thread. You need to log in to post, so if you don’t already have an account, you can register here. Thank you for any help you can provide.

(And if you’re on Facebook and contribute to SUMO, remember to join the Mozilla Firefox page and the SUMO Contributors Facebook group.)

Last week, Microsoft released Windows 7, the latest version of the Windows operating system. The majority of our visitors to Firefox Support are Windows users today, and “Windows 7” is one of our most popular search terms because users want to know if Firefox works on Windows 7.

We need to make sure all the information in the knowledge base provides them with correct information, and is user-friendly to Windows 7 users. This will be especially important when the EU browser ballot is deployed in Europe, because we expect to see a large increase in Firefox users running Windows 7. Many of those users will probably be computer novices that have never heard of the term web browser before.

If you are a Windows 7 user, we could really use your help going through the knowledge base articles and testing the instructions on each article. If you see anything that needs updating, we can show you how to edit an article. Even for instructions that are correct, we would still love to get help with updating screenshots and screencasts so they are for Windows 7 instead of XP/Vista.

To get started, we have instructions on how to edit articles, and a list of articles to go through. If you have any questions, just ask in the Contributors forum. Thanks for any help you can provide.

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Over 4 million weekly visitors the last couple of weeks. Yay, F1 keyboard shortcut!
  • New record in forum threads last week. Could be a combination of .NET searches, Windows 7 searches, and more traffic
  • What are the time ranges for trended search terms?
    • cilias to double-check with Ken
• Last week’s weekly support issues

Knowledge Base

• New articles:
  • Crash signature – RtlpCoalesceFreeBlocks or RtlAllocateHeap
  • Will Firefox work on Windows 7
• Need someone to help with Windows 7 screenshots
  • Possible change in screenshot policy, preferring Windows 7 screenshots over XP? (XP still has the majority of traffic)
    • Makes sense, especially given the upcoming Browser Ballot audit
    • cilias to announce in the forum
• How can we create a bridge for Live Chat and Forum contributors to start contributing to the KB?
  • One way is to make sure more people see the contributor forum, where the SUMO community is connected
  • Encourage people to sign up on SUMO before being approved in Live Chat — already happening (zzxc)
  • Send out e-mail to new forum contributors (cww)
  • cilias to post in Contributors forum to ask for other ideas

Forum

• New helpers: TXGuy and jscher2000

Live Chat

• Graph of issues and tags
  • Main takeaway is that there is a very long tail of support requests coming in to Live Chat, which is expected
  • The graphs helps spotting and comparing trends between weeks (for example, the Facebook spike a few weeks ago)
• New very active Live Chat contributor: fingalPC. Welcome, and thanks so much for your help so far!

Roundtable

• Mockup of the help users on forum screen

Firefox 3.6 is the next significant Firefox milestone release, and the first beta release is coming soon. We need to start thinking about what updates we need to make to the knowledge base, and plan how to deploy those updates.

The plan itself is not set yet. First, we would like to gather a list of changes from 3.5 to 3.6 that affect user support. Once we have a good idea of what has changed in Firefox, we can:

2. Assess what changes need to be made to the knowledge base.
3. Establish which changes can be done using a script that will automatically update all articles.
4. Draft an update plan.

I’ve started a wiki page on wiki.mozilla.org to gather a list of changes in Firefox 3.6. If you know of any changes not on the list that affect user support, please add them to the page with a link to relevant information (bug number or blog post).

If you have any questions, just ask in the Contributors forum thread. Thank you!

Since Live Chat started, over 1000 people have helped us in at least one chat, and over 200 have been regular helpers. We have answered almost 50,000 total chats (between 600 and 1000 each week), with 10 to 20 people answering chats weekly. As we get close to two years of offering Live Chat support, there are many great Live Chat community members that we would like to recognize. Tobias Markus (Tobbi) and Tanner are two Support community members we’d like to mention specifically for their continuing contributions throughout the project.

Tobias got started with Live Chat in January 2009, and since has become an active contributor to the Support knowledge base and the German localization community.  Earlier this month, he met up with dozens of other Mozilla project contributors at Mozcamp EU 2009 in Prague, and he has recently been working on creating add-ons for Firefox.  Tanner has been helping with the support project since starting with Live Chat in October, 2008. He has since become active in introducing new community members, in helping the Quality Assurance project by testing and investigating bugs, and in moderating our Support Forum. Tobbi and Tanner: thanks for being a great part of the Support community and the Mozilla project!

For people wanting to get more involved with Mozilla, helping with Live Chat is a great way to make a difference and connect with others. If a question isn’t documented on our Knowledge Base and the helper doesn’t know the answer, it’s easy to get advice from other people who are signed in. One of the best aspects of Live Chat is that you don’t need to be an expert to make a big difference, as it’s usually easy to find someone else who is already familiar with most any issue. All you need is 1-2 hours and a genuine willingness to help!

If you’re looking for a way to get more involved with other Mozilla volunteers, or if you enjoy helping others solve problems, we’d love to have you as part of the support community. You can join Live Chat directly, or see all the ways you can help Mozilla Support.

Over the weekend, there was quite a bit of activity regarding security issues in .NET Framework Assistant and Windows Presentation Foundation.  These are add-ons that were installed via Windows Update for a majority of Windows users. Mike Shaver did a great job of summarizing what happened and why those MS add-ons were temporary blocklisted here.

Given the number of people with these add-ons on their system who would be notified by Firefox, we anticipated that users would come to Firefox Support with questions about the blocklist.

Indeed, since October 15th, “windows presentation foundation” and “blocklist” are the top recent gaining search terms.

For this issue, we already had an article about the add-ons blocklist, and a mention of the .NET Framework Assistant in an article about uninstalling add-ons. To accommodate the increase in search traffic about the recently blocklisted items, we created 2 new articles (1 for each MS add-on), and expanded the add-ons blocklist article.

If you come across any users asking for more information about these blocklisted items and how to enable or disable them, you can direct him/her to these articles:

• Windows Presentation Foundation
• .NET Framework Assistant
• Add-ons blocklist

Sumo

• SUMO goals 2010 brainstorm (click the link for the actual outcomes of the discussion!)
• Weekly metrics
• Last week’s weekly support issues

Knowledge Base

• New approver: Tobbi!
• Gathering list of changes in Firefox 3.6 that will affect support. After we have the list complete, we can assess what articles need to be updated, and what can be scripted.
• Ideas for article on staying safe on the web [1]
• New articles:
  • Multi-touch does not work
  • Unexpected installation error -203 when installing add-ons
  • Unable to download attachments from Hotmail or Windows Live Mail
  • .NET Framework Assistant
  • Windows Presentation Foundation

Live Chat

• Chat tags Tags and issues from last week
  • “Other” issues account for almost 60% of all chats

Roundtable

• Search indexing should be working again now

Following up on my post last week about how the SUMO project developed in 2009, it’s time to repeat the circle for 2010! It’s time to start thinking about where to take the project, which areas to focus on, and ultimately which goals to define for 2010.

To help get the goal discussion started, it’s obviously helpful to know why SUMO exists. In my opinion, there are three main reasons:

1. To help people have a great Firefox (and by extension web) experience
2. To provide key user and product insights to the Mozilla community
3. To strengthen and grow Mozilla’s community

Based on this list, we can create three focus areas, or “buckets” for our 2010 goals:

• Improve the support experience for users
• Provide better/more accurate/more detailed metrics and insights for other Mozilla teams and the entire Mozilla community
• Make the SUMO experience more enjoyable for contributors

In today’s SUMO meeting, we’ll kick off the discussion by spending 15-30 minutes brainstorming ideas. You’re very welcome to call in! That said, if you don’t have time to call in, or would rather share your ideas in writing, there is an active thread in the SUMO contributor forum dedicated for this. Please feel free to post there with thoughts, ideas, or, if you’re feeling particuarly creative, screenshots, mockups or screencasts of what you have in mind.

Of course, if you don’t have a SUMO account and for some reason don’t want to create it, you are welcome to participate by commenting on this blog post too.

Here’s one of those things that make me feel good about being a part of SUMO and Mozilla.

In late 2008, the SUMO team started to collect feedback from the community about what we should focus on in order to make the platform and Firefox Support website a more exciting place to collaborate on. We also added our own ideas about how to improve the experience for both Firefox users visiting the site and contributors helping out. The result of this work is something I called the Vision for SUMO followed by the SUMO 2009 roadmap.

Since then, we’ve worked to make the vision a reality. We’ve improved the quality of our support. We’ve improved our ability to provide user insights and track user trends. We’ve managed to implement many cool and useful features (with lots of help from the amazing web development team at Mozilla) which really made it easier and more fun to contribute on SUMO as well as improved the experience on the website for users. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve had a good time.

All these amazing achievements aside, this is what makes me the most proud:

Growth of SUMO community since October 2008

In a little less than a year, we’ve managed to double the number of active locales, doubled the number of translated articles, and most importantly, more than doubled the number of active SUMO contributors!

As a side note, the survey that was sent out after MozCamp 09 in Prague showed that 30% of the attendees were involved with user support. That’s an amazingly large proportion of our European community actively involved with helping our users having a great experience on the web!

30% of Ludovic Hirlimann's photo of the European community, used under CC-BY-NC license

Even though it’s just October, I’m already blown away by the achievements by everyone in the SUMO community in 2009. And by the way, I’m glad it’s just October: it’s time to start thinking about where to take SUMO in 2010! More on that tomorrow very soon…