SUMO Blog

Last Thursday, the bug fixes for SUMO 1.3 were pushed to support.mozilla.com. The big focus was on productization, and we also managed to add some other great changes.

So what is productization? From the beginning of the project, the plan was to create a support solution for Firefox, but do it in such a way that makers of other software could use SUMO for their own support sites. In the future, Fennec (the mobile version of Firefox) will have its own support site, using its own implementation of SUMO. In SUMO 1.3, major work was done on separating the code that is specific to Firefox Support from code that can be used for other products. In addition, work was done on turning the code into something you can install yourself. If you would like to try it yourself, we have instructions on wiki.mozilla.org.

Somehow, in all of that work, we managed to add a significant new feature: Article review email notifications. We’ve said in many previous blog posts that our knowledge base works differently from other wikis. All edits go through a review process before being public. For new contributors, who have not visited the Contributors forum, this is a major point of disconnect. When reviewing edits, it is important to state why you are approving or rejecting an edit. Even a simple “Thank you” message can go a long way.

In SUMO 1.3, we take an approach similar to posting to a moderated mailing list. When a contributor edits an article, an email is sent to the contributor, saying that their edit is waiting for review. The reviewer can approve or reject the edit, and a text box is provided for the review to give their feedback to the contributor. When the edit is reviewed, an email is sent to the contributor, telling them the result of the review, including the message from the reviewer. Just as important is the fact that all of these messages include an invitation to the Contributors forum.

This new review notification feature should make a huge difference in growing the SUMO community. Instead of newcomers making one edit and leaving (oblivious to the fact that their edit is not public yet), this gets them thinking about how SUMO works, connects them to the rest of the community, and gives us a chance to personally thank each contributor.

The full list of SUMO 1.3 bugs is on Bugzilla. This release has over 90 bugs, which is the most ever in a SUMO release (around three times more than most SUMO releases). A big thank you goes to Paul Craciunoiu, James Socol, Eric Cooper, Stephen Donner, Vishal Kamdar, Krupa Raj, and SUMOdev lead Laura Thomson for an extraordinary amount of work. Not to mention IT for all their work with the release push. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the Contributors forum, or join the #sumodev IRC channel to thank them yourself.

Thousands of questions are asked on the support forum each week, making it one of our primary ways to help Firefox users around the world. For contributors, we can significantly ease workflow and make helping on the forums a lot simpler by improving the interface. In September, we have a milestone scheduled (SUMO 1.4) to address some of the primary issues with usability on the forums. These are based off of suggestions we got in our survey from last quarter (full results) as well as discussions in the contributors forum and over IRC. Here are some of the things we’re looking forward to:

• Thread filters that help you answer questions. We’ll be adding the ability (for registered and logged in contributors) to filter for questions with no replies, with no proposed solution or where the original contributor has come back asking for more help. This lets contributors focus on just the threads that need help rather than having to flip through threads that other people have already replied in.
• Advanced search. With new search features, you’ll be able to search for threads based on users who posted in them, date, status as well as sort your results in a variety of ways. Finding threads you answered previously just got a lot easier!
• Better guidance for users asking questions. One of the most frustrating things about helping on the forums is that users will ask questions with very little information and you have to take guesses on what they’re trying to say or give broad all-encompassing answers. With a clearer, guided question form, questions asked by users will contain more detail and be easier to answer in a straightforward way. Also, once users finish asking their question, we’ll be making it much clearer how to get their answers via email or by bookmarking the thread.
• New and improved thread statuses. Now when you scan through the list of forum threads, you’ll be able to quickly see the threads which have a solution proposed and which need more information from the question asker. We’re also adding a status for questions that aren’t related to Firefox. If you’re a moderator and you come across a thread about Thunderbird, Windows, Office or general web development, marking it as not being about Firefox means that other contributors will know to skip over it.

These are just four of the dozens of improvements we’ll be making to the forum experience. We’ll be blogging again with some more features to expect in this release as well as ways you can help out testing these changes.

Last week, the fixes for SUMO 1.1 were applied to support.mozilla.com. The big news: SUMO now supports screencasts! A screencast is a video recording of a computer screen. In the same way that images of a computer screen (i.e. screenshots) are helpful in illustrating what Firefox support instructions are referring to, screencasts go a step further by showing users what the actions of those instructions look like.

Firefox 3.0.x users will be able to view screencasts in Flash format, but we also support the open video format called Ogg/Theora. Firefox 3.5 users will be able to view Ogg/Theora videos without the need for a plugin. For more information about open video, read In Support of Open Video.

What makes screencasts on SUMO especially great is that the SUMO knowledge base is a wiki. Adding a screencast to an article can be done by anyone! (That means you!) We have provided a tutorial on adding screencasts to the knowledge base, with a list of software you can use to create them. Adding of screencasts is fully integrated with the article editor; so if you know how to edit a knowledge base article, you know how to add a screencast. If you need any help adding screencasts, you can always ask in the Contributors forum. And the next time you’re having trouble explaining something about how to use Firefox, you’ll be able to show them.

I’m sure everyone knows the cliche “A picture is worth a thousand words.” It is certainly true, and in the Firefox Support knowledge base we’ve encouraged the use of screenshots to help users understand the text. But have you ever heard of “A video is worth a thousand pictures”? That’s right, soon we will be adding video (aka screencast) support to Firefox Support!

• Adding screencasts will work just like adding images, and go through the same review process as all article edits.
• Articles will not be limited to one screencast. If an article has different sets of instructions, there will be a separate screencast for each set of instructions.
• 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 about open video, read In Support of Open Video.

We also have a pool of videos from the Screencast Contest, which we will be adding as well. Stay tuned for more information!

On the Firefox Support start pages[1][2], there are blocks of text on the sidebar labeled “Improve the Knowledge Base” and “Thunderbird”.

Those are referred to as “modules”, and until now those blocks have not been localizable. We are in the midst making the interface translator work on those modules. If you’d like to help test it, you can do so on the the staging server.

https://support-stage.mozilla.org/
username: support
password: stage

If you have any issues with it, comment on bug 444439 .

If you’re not familiar with the interface translator and have questions, just reply to this post.

Thanks!

[1]Website home page
[2]Product Help start page

Over the past few weeks we’ve been working to collect ideas and feedback for the SUMO Live Chat web client. Contributors currently use the open source Spark client to help in Live Chat, but we’re working on a web-based client to allow everyone to participate from any standards-compliant web browser. This web-based client will allow Live Chat to be tightly integrated with the SUMO Knowledge Base and Forum, streamlining the chat process for both users and contributors.

Spark has a lot of neat features that we will want in our web client, and we’re planning a number of improvements based on feedback from the community. To guide development, we’ve focused on some of the best ideas we’ve received to create mock-ups of the new Live Chat interface.

Much of the new functionality is intended to decrease the length of chat sessions, increasing user satisfaction while allowing contributors to help more people in less time. Communication following a chat session will be streamlined, and transferring chats between helpers will become more efficient. We will also be able to integrate with the new SUMO search engine, allowing helpers to find solutions to most issues without needing to open another window.

More details and implementation requirements for the Live Chat web client are on the project requirements page. We’d love to get feedback on these concepts or on implementation ideas — the best place to get in touch is the SUMO Contributors forum. (If you’re a Java developer and are interested in helping with this project, you can find the SUMO development team in #sumodev on irc.mozilla.org.)

Live Chat, the most social way to help with Firefox Support, allows contributors to chat with Firefox users and with each other to help people use Firefox. To see more ways to get involved with SUMO, check out our guide to getting started.

Last Thursday, SUMO 0.8.2 was pushed to the Firefox Support website. This update was more about pushing whatever fixes were checked in, so the SUMOdev team can start focusing on 0.9. However, that doesn’t mean some pretty neat things weren’t checked in.

There are two additions to the article editor. Sometimes people don’t read the documentation before editing articles, and add content to the knowledge base that is against policy. Now we have a notice at the top of the editor that links to the policies page as well as to a couple of other key contributor documents.

In addition, we added a checkbox for you to indicate if the article applies to Firefox 3.1. When the new SUMO search engine is used, this categorization can be utilized to make search results only display articles that apply to the version the user has.

We also had a problem with the Firefox version detection, causing no content to show at all on some articles, and confusing users. That bug is now fixed.

We’ve also fixed the bug in the forums which prevented replies in older threads from bumping threads to the first page.

You can see a full list of SUMO 0.8.2 bug fixes in Bugzilla. Remember that if you see any bugs on support.mozilla.com or you think of a great new feature for the web site, please let us know about it in the Contributors Forum or file a bug in Bugzilla.

Hi folks! Earlier this week, there was another update to support.mozilla.com, I’d like to tell you about. This update was tagged as SUMO 0.8.1.

• The Vietnamese localization has now been enabled, and we welcome NGUYỄN-Mạnh Hùng, who will lead the Vietnamese Firefox Support effort.
• Contributors may have noticed that after login, you are now taken to the Contributor Home Page. This should give all contributors easier access to contributor tools, such as documentation, latest knowledge base edits, latest contributor discussions, and contributor news.
• Uploading images to knowledge base articles has been changed to fix some localization and security issues. You now have to upload an image before adding it to an article; and adding an image is done by picking a thumbnail in the article editor. For more information on adding images, see Editing articles.
• On Live Chat, there was a bug in which trainees could not be invited to new chat sessions; and it really hampered the training process. That bug is now fixed.
• The Forums also had a major bug, in which trying to view forum thread older than two weeks produced an error message. That bug has also been fixed, so users running a forum search can now read any discussion in the search results.
• The much anticipated new search engine has been in testing, and quite a few backend changes were made to prepare for the launch. We’re close to switching to the new search engine!

You can see a full list of SUMO 0.8.1 bug fixes in Bugzilla. Remember that if you see any bugs on support.mozilla.com or you think of a great new feature for the web site, please let us know about it in the Contributors Forum or file a bug in Bugzilla.

A couple of weeks ago, the bug fixes for SUMO 0.8 were pushed to
support.mozilla.com. This update has quite a few goodies!

New search engine

Over the summer, student Alexandre Michelis and mentor Nelson Ko worked on a Google Summer of Code project to create a search engine specifically for SUMO. In SUMO 0.8, the back-end code for the new search engine was implemented. After many months of hard work, we just need to do some final testing, then we are going to switch over to the new search engine. When that happens, we’ll post in detail of all the great advantages of the new search engine.

Support for Firefox 3.1 specific content

In the Firefox Support Knowledge Base, we use a great feature called “SHOWFOR” that allows articles to display different content, depending on the users’ operating system and version of Firefox. When it comes to version numbers, we have only been able to differentiate between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 content. Now I am pleased to announce that we can now differentiate between Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.1! For more information on how it works, and updating articles for Firefox 3.1, you can read the previous blog post.

Template for new articles

So you’ve decided to create a new article. Great! But you open the article editor to start writing the article, and don’t really know how to format the article. We now have pre-filled markup and text in the article editor when creating a new article, that includes where to put the problem and solution, but how to format the problem and solution. This should make it easier for people to get involved, as well as improve the continuity of Knowledge Base articles. And….it’s localizable! I’ll be in contact with Firefox Support locale leaders with instructions, and if you don’t want to wait, email me or comment on this blog post.

Secure log in

When you log in or register, it is done through a secure (https) connection.

Forum performance

There has been quite a bit of work done to improve the performance of the forums, which has been a major issue.

There are more highlights that we post about soon. In all, SUMO 0.8 is the without a doubt the most significant SUMO release; and the SUMOdev team deserves a big applause for working so hard. You can see a full list of SUMO 0.8 bug fixes in Bugzilla. Remember that if you see any bugs on support.mozilla.com or you think of a great new feature for the web site, please let us know about it in the Contributors Forum or file a bug in Bugzilla.

On Tuesday December 2nd, the bug fixes for SUMO 0.7.3 were applied to the Firefox Support web site.

One new feature that should help us get a better handle on forum responses is the ability to classify response as actual attempts to help the user, rather than something like a “me too” post or someone clarifying the problem.  Specifically, you can classify your response as a proposed solution to the problem or a request for more information. We can then have more accurate numbers on how many threads are actually getting help; and contributors and filter threads based on the whether or not a solution has already been proposed, using the “Solved Status” drop-down menu mentioned in the SUMO 0.7.2 post.

To classify your response when you compose a forum response, click on the drop-down menu just above the text area, called “Select purpose of your response:” and choose the most fitting item.

In addition, there was a major bug which caused new articles not to be assigned to any language, and prevented contributors from removing the “Content may be out of date” warning on some articles. That bug has now been fixed. You can test this out by creating a new article. As a result, localizers should now be receiving notifications of new translations again.

You can see a full list of SUMO 0.7.3 bug fixes in Bugzilla. Remember that if you see any bugs on support.mozilla.com or you think of a great new feature for the web site, please let us know about it in the Contributors Forum or file a bug in Bugzilla.