SUMO Blog

A couple of weeks ago, the Firefox Support web site was updated to SUMO 0.7.2, which includes a number of bug fixes and a couple of new features. You may have already noticed some improvements.

If you have started a forum discussion, and get the answer you were looking for, you can mark the discussion as solved and rate the experience with solving your problem. It’s a great way to find out how satisfied users are with the forum.

Contributors looking to help people in the forum will then see that the discussion is marked as solved, and know to skip over it.

You can even set the forum to only display discussions with “Solved” or “Unsolved” status! There’s a drop-down menu called “Solved Status” at the bottom of the forum.

There is now a link at the top of forum pages (i.e. breadcrumb) to take you back to the forum list.

For a full list, you can see our list of SUMO 0.7.2 bug fixes. Remember that if you see any bugs on support.mozilla.com, or you’ve thought of a great new feature for the web site, you can let us know about it in the Contributor Forum or file a bug in Bugzilla.

It’s been busy for us in the last few months.  Not only was Firefox 3 released, but the software we’ve been using for Live Chat is now open source! We’re looking forward to being able to dig in and help make some of the improvements we’ve been waiting for. In the mean time, we’ve made some smaller changes that we hope improves the Live Chat experience for everyone.

Max chat lowered to 3 – 4 chats at once was still too hectic, so we’ve lowered it again to 3. As always feel free to take fewer if you need to. We’re working on hooking up UI for helpers to set their own max if they only want to take 1 or 2 at a time so that you don’t have to leave old chats open or keep rejecting incoming requests.

New Advanced queue – We’ve created a new Advanced Queue that users who have been waiting more than a certain amount of time will be transfered to. To start with, admins and room monitors will be members of the Advanced Queue, though anyone who is comfortable helping with any chat should also be in this queue. This will allow us to focus on monitoring and helping our support team, but we’ll also be able to jump in and pick up the oldest chats if the queue gets overwhelming.

New patch! Position in queue – To take advantage of the new Advanced Queue we needed a way to see which queue a chat was coming from. Thanks to zzxc, we killed two birds with one stone and now we can see what position someone is in the queue. Currently the server offers chats based on which chat was offerend to a helper last and not based on position in queue. When helping out, please take users with a position of 3 or lower. For now you have to keep hitting reject until you see someone with a low enough position. In the future we hope to fix the offer system so that it offers the chat with the lowest position by default.

Come see us in #sumodev if you’re interested in helping us make more improvments!

In other development news, zzxc and mzz have been working on a build of gajim that works with Fastpath. If you’d like to help test it (or even hack on it) please find zzxc on IRC and he’ll get you started.

Thanks to Ehsan Akhgari, Jason Barnabe, David Baucum, and Steve England, we are making steady progress with the Knowledge Base!

Of the original 33 articles, 15 have already been written. That means 18 articles left to be written:

• 399520 – Internet Explorer terminology – Done
  
• 401769 – Chrome registration failed – Done
• 404887 – Troubleshooting extensions – Done
• 398633 – Windows error opening Internet shortcut or local HTML file
• 398635 – How to change the “latest headlines” feed – Done
• 398639 – Search suggestions – Done (Ehsan)
• 398641 – Exporting data to Internet Explorer – Done
• 398642 – Exporting data to Safari
• 398643 – Exporting data to Opera – Done (David)
• 398644 – Exporting data to Netscape
• 398645 – Exporting data to SeaMonkey
• 398646 – Exporting data to Mozilla Suite
• 398650 – DOM Inspector
• 398678 – Auto form fill – Done
  
• 399392 – Firefox.exe always open
• 399506 – Transferring data to a new profile – Assigned (Steve)
• 399508 – Clipboard not working
• 399509 – Autoconnect – Done (Ehsan)
• 399510 – Granting JavaScript access to the clipboard – Done (Ehsan)
• 399513 – Configuring keyboard shortcuts
• 399626 – How Do I disable 3rd Party Cookies? – Done (Jason)
• 400052 – Add troubleshooting links to help articles
• 400913 – Error writing to xpcom_core.dll
• 400916 – Reloading live bookmarks – Done (Ehsan)
• 401261 – Unresponsive script warning
• 401264 – Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete
• 401265 – Firefox only prints the first page
• 401267 – Firefox makes unrequested connections – Done (Steve)
• 401336 – Upgrading from Firefox 1
• 404931 – Links do not open in Firefox
• 404933 – Firefox always starts in Safe Mode – Done (Jason)
• 405950 – Document custom install options
• 406096 – Moving from Windows to Mac

Just click on the number link and either assign the bug to you or post a comment in the bug that you plan to write it (if you don’t have a Bugzilla account, just post a comment here and I’ll do the work for you), then create an article. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the formatting used — the important thing is that we get the content. We can always fix the rest afterwards.

Last week, we upgraded support.mozilla.com with the latest changes from the staging server. I thought this would be a good opportunity to highlight some of the more useful changes.

Tags in This Article

All knowledge base article now list their associated tags in the sidebar. Previously, a list of all available tags in the knowledge base was shown instead, which wasn’t exactly ideal. Tags are a very powerful way to connect relevant articles together, which also makes them easier to find.

Related Articles

Articles that are closely related to the knowledge base article you’re currently viewing are now conveniently listed in the sidebar. This makes the article tagging more useful, and helps finding relevant content if you’re interested in a specific Firefox topic.

Unified Breadcrumb

Previously, the breadcrumb for SUMO itself was located under the article name, while the global mozilla.com breadcrumb was still at the top left corner of the page. The two breadcrumbs have now been neatly unified, making the SUMO website appear more integrated with mozilla.com.

Better Top 10 List

The Top 10 Support Articles list has been temporarily hard-coded instead of being automatic, because we were having a number of problems:

• It listed articles that aren’t really articles per se, such as the start page itself, and the Contributor Home Page.
• It made some of the articles in the other “New to Firefox?” box appear twice.
• It used the accumulated page hits to calculate the rating, which is skewed towards old article.

Until we have fixed all issues, we will update the list manually on a weekly basis.

Better Log in/Log out Links

The information about how to contribute, and the log in link are easier to find now that they’re separated. In addition, it’s now easier to see if you’re logged in or not.

When logged in, the top right corner link changes to “My Account” and “Log out”. Small, but subtle changes making it easier to use the site as a contributor.

Speaking of contributors, there will be even more improvements next week that will make it easier for contributors to edit articles, and for reviewers to approve edits. Stay tuned for more updates!