After running the en-US in-product help content through a final review process on SUMO Day last Friday, we’ve now declared the articles good enough to be ready for localization.
Locale leaders: for complete info, including diffs, please see the announcement in the mozilla.dev.l10n.web newsgroup.
Our first SUMO Day last Friday was a success. We’re working on a more complete wrap up of the experience and will post a more fleshed out report soon.
A huge thank you to everyone who joined during the event! You’re all very welcome to stay around in #sumo on a more regular basis — to us, every day is SUMO Day. 
It’s been a really fun and hectic SUMO Day so far, but there is still time for you to join! We’ll be available in #sumo until 6 PM PTD, which means there are almost three hours left of the event. Help us creating screenshots, updating article for Firefox 3, helping users, or find something else that suits you.
We’re waiting for you!
This day is all about getting to know SUMO (support.mozilla.com) and how to use the site to help other Firefox users enjoy their favorite browser — Firefox, that is. If you’ve thought about helping out with user support, but haven’t been sure where to start, this day is for you.
Hearing all the great things about the upcoming Firefox 3 and wishing you’d been a part of it? It’s not too late! Even when all the development and testing is done, there’s still a very important job left. Providing user support can help make sure the release goes smoothly for users who are updating or trying Firefox out for the first time.
The Firefox Support team would like to invite you to our first SUMO day! On April 11th we’ll be hosting a day all about getting to know SUMO and how to use our site to help other Firefox users enjoy their favorite browser. If you’ve thought about helping out with user support, but haven’t been sure where to start, this day is for you.
Our team is gearing up to show you the ropes and answer all your questions. Not only will there be the normal tasks of editing articles, and answering questions in the forums and on chat, but we’re planning special projects that will help you get to know our site, so you can jump right in or get started slowly. We’re also looking for your feedback on what still needs to get better for our community to grow.
And of course, we’re hoping many of you will stick around for release day when you can be the difference between an ordinary internet user and a proud Firefox fan.
Stay tuned for more info. In the meantime, we’d love feedback, ideas, suggestions, comments… Either post a comment in this blog post, or in the SUMO contributor’s forum (you need an account to post there), or in the mozilla.support.planning newsgroup.
Don’t feel like waiting for next Friday? Check out the different ways you can get involved today. We’d love to have you onboard!
Unfortunately, we had to take the SUMO site down today because of serious performance issues that affected other services like Bugzilla. Rest assured that awesome people are working around the clock to fix this and that the site isn’t lost in the good old cyber space. We’re just facing some (major) problems keeping up with the increased traffic right now.
Oh, and justin, morgamic, and laura rock.
We’ve now gathered enough feedback from the community to make a decision about the SUMO Day: we’ll host the event on Friday, April 11th. Thanks for the feedback everyone and stay tuned for more info about this soon…
Last week, there were two new keywords created to help with Firefox user documentation.
If you see any bugs that need changes to current Firefox user documentation, or new user documentation, please add the user-doc-needed keyword.
Background bug: 418442
As most of you already know, SUMO is volunteer driven, and Live Chat is no exception. Because of this, we’ll be constantly revisiting our officially offered hours to make sure they are the most convenient for our helpers and that they offer users the best chance at getting support. Now that we’ve been in full swing for a month and a half our helpers have been getting a better idea of how much time they need to set aside for helping with Live Chat and when they have that time. As such, we’ve had to make some not minor changes to our hours, but we feel they’ll be much better for everone.
The new hours are as follows:
Monday - Friday
The hours are now the same Monday through Friday. While we lose the advantage of having more varied hours, it makes it much easier to remember for users and helpers alike when we’re open. We’ve also added an evening shift, which is more convenient for students in North America, and for many on the other side of the world. While we’ve retained our afternoon shift, we’ve had to drop our morning hours. Our hope is that the new consistent hours will make it easier for new helpers to become involved and that it will only be a matter of time before we’re expanding our hours again.
As always, our hours are only the times we’re trying to guarrantee someone will be around to help. You can help, and get support at many other hours in the day. If you find you can help during hours we aren’t already covering let us know and as soon as enough people have signed up for those times, we’ll add them. See our article on helping with Live Chat for more information.
support.mozilla.com now better supports localization. There is still work to be done, but we’ve made a number of important accomplishments this week that are worth mentioning:
If you try to visit a page that is not yet translated to the language you specify, e.g. http://support.mozilla.com/fr/kb/Profiles, a notification will show up at the top of the article, informing you that the page is not yet translated. Note that we’re still working on making the whole UI localized, including strings like “Table Of Contents,” and we’ll get to it shortly.
A big thank you to Nelson Ko who has worked really hard to implement many of these changes over the weeks. Thanks also to Jason for the patch for colorized diffs, and to everyone else for testing and submitting feedback!