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!
Today we are officially opening our Live Chat support to users of Firefox. Users who can’t find their answer in the knowledge base or the forum can now get real time help troubleshooting their issues with more skilled Firefox users.
When a helper is logged in and ready to help Firefox users, the Live Chat page will show the following, friendly Foxkeh:
If no one is available to help users out, this image will be shown instead:
Opening hours
We’ve set 3 hours a day, Monday through Friday, when our current volunteers can commit to being online to take questions. As more people can commit to being around at other times, we’ll expand our hours. This is when we encourage new volunteers to help, but you may find someone available to help at other times — we just can’t promise it yet.
You can be one of those Firefox experts!
In order to provide 24/7 coverage so our users never have to see the “We’re Closed” Foxkeh, we need more Firefox helpers. You don’t need to be an advanced user, or have experience giving support to help out. Most of our helpers (and many of Mozilla’s community of developers) started out as Firefox users who had a question themselves. Many questions asked will already be covered in the knowledge base or the forum, and they either couldn’t find them or just need help going through the steps. Our software lets you talk to other helpers, and even invite someone else to help you give support if you get stumped. A good attitude and some patience is really all you need, and soon you’ll be an expert. Who knows, maybe you will end up being a Mozilla developer as well?
A big thank you goes out to Lucy, the SUMO team, Nelson, morgamic of WebDev, and oremj, aravind & mrz of IT for making this happen! Thanks also to all the people who helped us test the software before the launch. Last but not least, to the community of helpers out there already available to help users of Firefox: without you guys, this effort would have been completely fruitless. You rock!
I’m pleased to announce the opening of the official Firefox support forum! The forum is a result of a few months of work, and I’d like to thank all those that provided input into its design, those that coded it, and those that tested it. Now the real work begins!
These forums are meant for Firefox support only. Discussion of other Mozilla applications and general, non-technical-support Firefox discussion should continue where it happens currently, like mozillaZine. Because the forum is Firefox support only, we were able to build it so suit that purpose. Here are a few examples of the benefits the support.mozilla.com forums have over a generic forum.
The forums and the Knowledge Base being integrated in the same piece of software makes things easier for forum helpers. The syntax for forum posts is the same as for Knowledge Base articles, so linking to Knowledge Base articles is simple. Instead of remembering a URL, you just have to remember the article’s name - ((Safe Mode)) automatically becomes a link to the Safe Mode article.
Users sometimes don’t know what information is important to post for others to be able to help them. The forum automatically determines the user’s version of Firefox, operating system, and plugins, and includes this information when the user asks a question. Users are prompted to give the steps to reproduce their problem, any error text they receive, and a URL if it’s a problem with a particular website.
Forum discussions can get into the dozens of pages and it can become very hard to help any one person. This is compounded by there not being any way to tell anonymous users apart. To prevent this, the forum encourages users to start their own threads rather than continuing someone else’s thread. It will also let anonymous users enter a display name, which is then remembered in subsequent posts.
Perhaps the most useful aspect of the forum isn’t even in the forum itself. Rather than having users asking questions as their first support option, support.mozilla.com directs them to search the Knowledge Base. This will help prevent contributors from answering the same questions over and over.
There are more features coming in the future. One of them will let users mark their question as being answered, which lets helpers easily find people still looking for help. Another will let users register and ask a question in one step, which will make it easier for them to find their posts in the future. Of course, we’re open to your suggestions as well.
So go ahead and dive in! If you have a question about Firefox, ask it! If you’re fairly knowledegable about Firefox, answer some questions! If you have any feedback, it’s very much appreciated as a comment in this blog, on mozilla.support.planning, and on the new contributor’s subforum.
We are currently working hard to build a kick-ass Firefox support site at support.mozilla.com, also known as SUMO. However, the site is only usable for English speaking people today, representing about 50% of the Firefox user base. While providing support for 50% of our users is a good start, we plan on extending the scope of SUMO in the future, and I thought it would be a good idea to blog about these plans.
Here is the basic idea for the SUMO l10n roll-out:
Last time I blogged about the SUMO milestones, the plan was to improve localization support (l10n) for the Knowledge Base before we rolled out Forums and Live Chat. Since then, however, we have decided to push l10n back for a couple of reasons:
Here is the updated milestone list, along with estimated release dates:
The knowledge base of support.mozilla.com is using TikiWiki, an open-source content management system. We are excited to let you know that tonight around 7 pm PST, we will upgrade TikiWiki to version 1.10, which will give us a number of bug fixes and improvements, such as:
We’re expecting the upgrade to happen seamlessly with zero downtime. However, if you see any problems with the new version, please let us know, either in the newsgroup, or here in the blog.
After the upgrade, we will work on the remaining bugs in the 0.1 milestone, which should be completed this week. If you would like to suggest further improvements or help hacking on the software, please let us know, or join the awesome TikiWiki community. We’d love to see you involved!
Thanks to Nelson Ko from the TikiWiki community, and Mike Morgan from Mozilla for helping with this software upgrade.
Based on a number of meetings the last few days, we have a preliminary plan for the technical rollout of support.mozilla.com during Q4 2007:
Would be nice with a graphical roadmap, but hopefully this is good enough for now.
The synchronization from the staging server to the real support site (support.mozilla.com) has now been completed. This means that if you are a contributor, your account should have been transferred and you should start hacking on the articles at support.mozilla.com instead. We’re still working on some technical issues, but the site is mostly up and running.