SUMO Blog

With Firefox 3.5 rolling off the presses, it’s time for the long-awaited Support Firefox Day. We’re planning on having the event June 25th at 10 AM PDT (1 PM EDT).

At this event, we’ll be talking about Firefox 3.5, supporting the fastest Firefox ever and how Firefox support has grown along with the browser. There will be a preview of some of the new Firefox 3.5 features, with live demos and Q&A. We’ll also be going over the new screencasts feature in SUMO as well as some tips and resources for helping. At the end of the session, we’ll all get together and spend a couple hours answering questions on the support forums. If you’ve never done Firefox support before or are just curious to learn about how it works at Mozilla, this is a fun and interactive way to get involved.

You can get all the details and sign up for the event at the Support Firefox Day main page.

See you there!

A few days ago, the SUMO community got together to polish the Firefox 3 Manual created by the amazing FLOSS Manuals community and make it ready for publishing. It was a very successful effort and we now have a manual for Firefox 3 that we can be very proud of!

What many people (outside of Italy, at least) might not know is that our new Firefox 3 Manual isn’t the first manual for Firefox produced. In fact, back in 2006, Underpass, tittoproject, and miki64 from the Mozilla Italia community wrote a Firefox manual entirely written in Italian, based on their strong experiences supporting users in their local forum. Nothing similar existed at the time, and the purpose of this manual was to provide solutions to some of the most common issues for Firefox users so fewer people had to visit the forum — just like SUMO works today!

The Italian Firefox manual is called FireFAQ and is available for download in pdf format. It was downloaded by over 30,000 people in the first 10 days and received very good reviews! Later, Mozilla Italia also wrote ThunderFAQ. The content of both manuals are released under the CC license, just like the Knowledge Base articles on SUMO.

Simone Lando (yes, that’s Underpass, one of the authors of the Italian Firefox manual!) wrote to tell me that when they had the opportunity to translate the SUMO KB contents, they decided not to update their manual anymore and instead focus entirely on SUMO. However, the experiences they gained by writing the FireFAQ manual proved to be very important for their excellent team work on SUMO today, which I think is fantastic to hear.

I am very excited that Mozilla Italia will attend to the EU Inter-Community Meetup in Geneva this weekend, where they will share more about their experiences with Firefox support and SUMO. Definitely expect a blog post about the inter-community meetup soon.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Firefox manual that could be read as a physical book or directly on the screen? Well, guess what: it already exists and even better, it’s completely free!

The FLOSS Manuals Project is changing the way book publishing works by bringing open source concepts to the process. They are engaged in building a platform and community designed to get interesting books published and do it on faster cycles. These people are the reason why we have a Firefox 3.0 Firefox Manual today. Read more about how this manual was created on Chris Hofmann’s blog post FLOSS Manuals: Changing the Publishing World One Book at a Time.

How is this relevant to SUMO? Tomorrow, we are doing a short and focused one-day sprint to do the last but very important steps of cleaning the manual up and make it ready for publishing, and we need your help! Contributing to FLOSS Manuals is as simple as contributing to SUMO and doesn’t require any technical skills.

When?

Tomorrow! Thursday, May 28 at 10 AM Pacific time, 1 PM Eastern time, or 19:00 Central European time. If you’re in Europe or Asia and want to start earlier, you are of course more than welcome to! I’m based in Sweden and will be going through the manual throughout the day.

Where and how?

1. Register to get an account at the FLOSS Manual site.
2. Go to the Write section of the Firefox Manual.
3. Pick a chapter that you want to read, click the “edit” link, and start improving it!

It’s really that simple.

On the right side of the website is a chat window where you will be able to chat with other participants (including me and the SUMO community members Matthew Middleton, Cheng Wang, and Chris Ilias).

What is the goal of tomorrow’s sprint?

We hope to achieve the following things:

• Clean up the language and remove typos, etc.
• Remove inconsistencies
• Verify and make sure all information is correct
• Flag chapters that will need updating for Firefox 3.5, which is quickly getting ready for a release

The last item is important, and we will probably do another one-day sprint shortly to actually update the information to Firefox 3.5 once it is released.

By just getting an account and spending 15 minutes proof-reading one chapter, you will make a huge difference to the quality of the manual, and your name will forever be included in the Credits section of both the online and paperback version.

Hope to see you tomorrow!

I wanted to share a good example of how Firefox Support wasn’t just launched to fill the support need of our 270+ million Firefox users, but also to allow us to quickly discover new or emerging issues and escalate them so they reach the attention of the right people.

The background of this story is the problem many Firefox users experienced with anti-virus program BitDefender a few weeks ago, where BitDefender would quarantine one of Firefox’s program files — nssutil3.dll — treating it as a malicious trojan.

In September last year, Asa Dotzler initiated an effort to better monitor our marvelous world wide web for emerging during new Firefox releases to detect possible new problems with Firefox quickly. This is now known as the Release Rapid Response Team, or RRRT for short — and SUMO is an important part of it.

On the morning of April 17, our SUMO Live Chat administrator and general genius Matthew was anchoring the Friday morning Live Chat shift. In this shift, many Live Chat helpers were getting support requests from users with BitDefender. Matthew then filed a bug, alerted the RRRT, and set up a canned message so helpers could quickly respond.

A quick search in the support forum showed quite a few threads, so Cheng Wang, chemist, IRC hacker, and administrator of the support forum, set up “sumobot” in irc.mozilla.org channel #sumo to alert us whenever forum threads were posted with “nssutil3″ or “bitdefender” in them, so we could quickly respond to those threads.

The first things we were telling users were that it was not actually a trojan and that we were working with BitDefender to figure out the false positive. SUMO contributors Noah and Quarantine deserve lots of props for making sure every thread about this issue got a quick response!

We had constant contact with Tomcat from QA, and Kev Needham, who hunted down BitDefender to get a first hand update about the situation. We were all in constant communication over IRC, so as soon as BitDefender released an update, we knew about it.

Once we got confirmation that the newest BitDefender fixed everything, Cheng posted to the bug and we were set. The whole thing was solved in less than 2 hours, which is amazing!

Many thanks to everyone on Live Chat for handing this on that end — these people really were pulling those chats out of the queue fast: noah, tmz, codylg13, dat, mzz, starpluck, leo, SliderMan, collin1000, and CoMpAnY.

A couple of weeks after this happened, I had the fortune to sit down in a conference room with Ken Kovash in Mountain View to discuss SUMO metrics. In this discussion, Ken helped me with setting up so we can see trended search terms on the website — search terms that are most rapidly changing in frequency in the last few days. So, rather than just looking at the most popular search terms on support.mozilla.com (which is almost always “bookmarks” and “clear history”), we can now also see trended search terms.

Ken and I looked back on the stats for April 17 and guess what? nssutil3.dll was at the top of the list! So now we have an even stronger zoom on our periscope lens in the ongoing hunt for problems on the web.

Expect to see this added to the Weekly Metrics shortly.

Tomorrow night (pacific time), SUMO will reach that magical version number 1.0. Although we already have a grand roadmap leading up to 2.0, today we’ll be looking back at all the work that took us where we are today. There is one particular achievement we’ve made that I would really like to emphasize on; I’ll get to it shortly, but first, some background.

How it all began

After Firefox 1.0 was released, the user base rapidly expanded — not just in the sheer number of users, but in types of users as well. Firefox quickly went from an early-adopters’ browser for the tech savvy (not because Firefox was hard to use, but because early adopters tend to have an affinity with technology) to a mainstream browser used by everyone. Meanwhile, some people in our naturally very tech savvy support community started to realize that we were struggling to keep up with the load. Both in terms of number of the volume of users that needed support, and the different kinds of users. Also, the web server itself was noticeably struggling with the increased web traffic.

After exploring different options and discussing within the community what we should do to improve the situation, it became clear that the new situation demanded a support platform that was better suited to our needs. One that would allow us to gauge the frequency of the most common support issues our users were having with Firefox. One that would allow the support documentation to be available to those other 50% of Firefox users that are not speaking English. One that would allow us to hack and improve upon the platform. One that could scale to meet the demand of over one hundred million users (at the time; today, that number has more than doubled). Most importantly of all, one that would enable the Mozilla community to contribute how it wanted to.

As a result, the SUMO project started.

What followed was a bunch of decisions that had to be made. What platform would we use to build this support website? Would we take something tried and true, like phpBB and MediaWiki? After careful examination of our options, we decided to pick something untried and new: TikiWiki. It had a wiki (our Knowledge Base) and forums integrated in one package, it had a nice plugin system that would allow us to extend the functionality to make the package more user support oriented. Also, the TikiWiki community was eager to collaborate to help us build SUMO faster.

In retrospect, choosing that path took us more work, and we still haven’t delivered on all things we want to improve with the platform. However, we are certainly getting there and SUMO 1.0 feels like a great achievement and a solid foundation for our ever-improving open source support platform.

Aside from choosing the technical platform, we also had to make tough decisions on things like the scope of our support documentation (what exactly do we support?), what kind of support experience we would like to present to our users, how localization should work, how common support issues would be reported to the development and QA teams, and so on.

Where we are today

SUMO deserves the 1.0 version number today because we are finally in a state where the platform can scale to meet the demand of our massive user base. We have a solution in place that can give us insights about which problems users are most frequently having with Firefox. We provide step-by-step solutions to over 200 known problems, and for any problems we don’t have the answer to already, we offer both e-mail support via our forum, and a way to get personal help via Live Chat.

Weekly unique visitors of SUMO since Firefox 3 was launched.

Every month, support.mozilla.com sees over 12,000,000 unique visitors. Every week, about 2,000 people get their problem solved in our support forum and Live Chat. Every day, over 1,000 people actively tell us that their Firefox problem was solved by an article in the Knowledge Base — note that that’s likely a small number in comparison with all the people that are getting help without letting us know!

Our biggest achievement

Part of the Mozilla community. Photo by Tristan Nitot.

Decisions, theory, and technology aside, our biggest achievement with SUMO is without hesitation our community. It’s really the amazing people in our community that made all this possible. Without them, we wouldn’t have a Knowledge Base with over 200 articles for common Firefox support issues. We wouldn’t have a support forum where users can have their problems solved. We wouldn’t have anything to offer for users who want to get in direct touch with a Firefox expert. We wouldn’t have anything to offer for users who don’t speak English.

Simply put, our community is what makes the Firefox Support website help thousands of users every day. I think that is the most important lesson learned in our road to 1.0 and something for everyone in our community to be truly proud about.

At the bottom of each knowledge base article, users have the option of submitting article feedback.

Feedback is great, but pointless if we don’t act on it. Every week, we take useful article comments, and post them in the Contributors Forum, so the support community can address that feedback in the wiki powered knowledge base.

For example, a user commented on the Clearing Private Data article, asking

“After you hit the clear , what happen next, Do I look for something to show it has been completed.”

We added a sentence to the article, stating that private data would cleared, and all that is left is to close the Clear Private data window.

As contributors, it is that type of feedback that often does not cross our minds; and so it is important to channel feedback from average users and take advantage of it. By listening to user feedback, we can improve the knowledge base in key ways that help the majority of Firefox users. It is also helpful to people wanting to contribute to the knowledge base, but don’t know what edits to make.

The weekly post usually happens on Wednesdays, and is titled “Useful article comments…” You can view this week’s digest now. If you are logged in, you can also see article comments at the bottom of each knowledge base article; and if you see a comment that you can address in the article, just edit the article!

Firefox support is one of the most rewarding ways you can give back to the Firefox community and answering questions on the forums is the simplest and fastest way to contribute.  There are just two steps: Register and answer.  With hundreds of new threads every day, it’s simple to find an issue you can help with and jump right in. In just ten minutes, you can help two, three or even ten users have a much better Firefox experience.  For some users, a link to the right knowledge base article or just a few suggestions make all the difference between hours of frustration and enjoying the bounty of the internet.  Not only that, but helping research a question can sometimes lead you to discover features of Firefox you didn’t know about, knowledge base articles you hadn’t read or even add-ons that you may want to try yourself.  It’s a win-win situation.

So give this a try: set aside just ten minutes each day for the Firefox support forums.  If you find a question you can’t answer, never fear! Try the knowledge base, ask us in the #sumo IRC channel, use the Contributors forum or simply find another thread you can help in.  You’ll be brightening someone’s day somewhere — and that is the best feeling of all.

Activity in the SUMO has increased rapidly over the past year and our community has really grown! Now we have this blog, a contributors forum and a newsgroup. There’s all sorts of work being done with users, finding common issues, writing help documentation and developing the many features on the website and tons more in the works in Bugzilla. With all this stuff going on, naturally, we figured a twitter feed would be a great way of letting community members know about things as-they-happen — in short 140-character bites. The feed will announce blog posts and discussion threads that may be of broader interest as well as give announcements that may be useful to SUMO contributors such as new KB articles, common issues or just to give a welcome to new people.

This is still very experimental and we’d love to get some feedback as to what you want to hear about. Either way, it’s casual, it’s informative and hopefully, it’s also a fun way to keep up to date with all the great things going on in the wide world of SUMO support.

If you’re new to twitter, it’s a webapp that lets users quickly update others with short messages and statuses. If you already have an account, just go to the moz_sumo page and click Follow! and you’ll be updated as to all the great things going on in the world of SUMO. If you would rather not get twitter, you can always subscribe to the RSS feed in your favorite reader or with a live bookmark and follow things right in your browser.

A few days ago, we blogged that we’ll be having a contributors meeting Monday Jan 12th. I just wanted to write this to say that I’m really excited to hear what everyone has to say about improving SUMO in 2009. We’ll be discussing the year past but focusing on the year ahead. So everyone bring your ideas, thoughts, and brilliant plans! A quick reminder about the meeting:

Monday Jan 12th 2 PM PST/5 PM EST/10 PM GMT:

• California: 650-903-0800 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toll-free (US): 800-707-2533 then password 369, conference number 280#
• Skype (free worldwide): +18007072533 then password 369, conference number 280#

The backchannel (where we post links and share text) is #sumo on irc.mozilla.org and our agenda and notes is on the Mozilla wiki.

If you can’t make the time, never fear, just tell us your thoughts in IRC at any time or come to one of our weekly phone meetings Mondays at 10 AM PST/1 PM EST/6 PM GMT.

This Monday, Jan 12th, we’ve moved the regular SUMO meeting and are inviting all SUMO contributors to call in to discuss their thoughts on the SUMO project.  Volunteers, contributors and helpers are a vital part of the SUMO community and we wanted to make sure that there was time set aside some time to hear your views on what we as a community can do.  SUMO isn’t just for users of Firefox, it’s also our community.  Most importantly, this meeting is a chance to get together and bounce around ideas and thoughts about how to make SUMO even better.

The call is scheduled to go from 2 PM PST/5 PM EST/10 PM GMT  and last for about 90 minutes (although we’ll certainly keep it freeform and extend it if needed).  Here are some things that we are looking to cover:

1. A quick wrapup of the past year: Knowledge base, Forums, Live Chat, Support Firefox Days.   What happened, (SUMO got started!) and what you felt went well/could have been done better.
2. Goals for 2009.  What do you want to see from SUMO over the next year and what projects would you like to take a lead on?
3. Firefox 3.1.  Mozilla Firefox 3.1 is being released soon and so SUMO will have to expand its coverage.  We’ll talk briefly about the major changes that users will be seeing and answer questions about what is happening on our end to prepare for it.
4. Open discussion about SUMO (on whatever you want).

That’s all that we have planned.  If you’re interested in improving SUMO or working more in-depth in user support, this is the perfect place to get started.  If you can’t make this meeting or want to get even more involved, feel free to join us for any of our weekly meetings which are Mondays at 1 PM EST/10 AM PST.  (You’re always welcome to join!)

Phone call details (pick one):

• California: 650-903-0800 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toll-free (US): 800-707-2533 then password 369, conference number 280#
• Skype (free): +18007072533 then password 369, conference number 280#

The backchannel (where we post links and share text) is #sumo on irc.mozilla.org

I hope to see you all there.

Cheng.

Note: We’ll be moving the start of LiveChat hours for Monday to after this meeting so there won’t be any conflict.