We are no longer using Bugzilla for article requests

We’ve recently changed the way we track requests for new Knowledge Base articles for Firefox Support:  Instead of using bugzilla, we’re now using a forum hosted on the site instead.

Here’s the background and reason for this change: When the KB was launched, we needed a way to track all article requests, triage them, monitor which ones needed review, and which ones were written. At the time, bugzilla was the best tool available for that job, but we knew it should only be a temporary solution, for a number of reasons:

• Bugzilla requires you to log in to a separate site.
• It raises the bar for people who want to help out with support, because bugzilla is a significantly more complicated interface than SUMO.
• We aren’t able to customize the experience on Bugzilla or make it easier to use.

After some discussion within our community, we came up with the idea of a special knowledge base article forum, where each article request is its own thread. It not only solves the issues we have with using Bugzilla, but we can use thread statuses to track article statuses (e.g. “Needs draft“, “Needs review“, “In the KB“, etc.). Contributor discussion about the article can then be integrated/viewed with the article itself, and article drafting can be more collaborative.

Some of those features require work from SUMOdev, but our reasoning here is that we can move to a KB article forum right now and gain some of the benefits of it right away.

After a month of testing on our staging server, the new Knowledge Base article forum is now created on support.mozilla.com. To request an article, any member of the community just needs to start a new thread. Anyone from the community can draft the article and post the URL in the thread. Article status is tracked by changing the title of the thread, and when an article is in the knowledge base, the thread is marked as solved.

There are already some article requests there, and outstanding article requests on Bugzilla will be migrated soon. The bugzilla component will still be available for any requests in cases where Bugzilla is preferred (and to make the transition to SUMO itself being as smooth as possible).

Let us know what you think!