Firefox Support Blog

The Firefox Support project (a.k.a. SUMO) community has grown lately, with new knowledge base content writers and localizers, forum moderators, and live chat helpers. This is really exciting news, as the project depends heavily on the community to succeed. Thank you to everyone who has helped us help Firefox users so far!

With the release of Firefox 3 coming up soon, we will need even more people to handle the increased load. One thing we’ve talked about for some time is to host a full day event, where new people get together with existing contributors to exchange knowledge, get to know each other more, and have a good time. Let’s call this event the SUMO Day!

The step in the planning process where we are right now is figuring out the best day for the SUMO Day event. If you’ve been contributing to SUMO in the past, or if you’re just interested in learning more about the project, please help us deciding when the SUMO Day should occur. The dates to choose from are:

• Thursday, April 3th
• Friday, April 4th
• Thursday, April 10th
• Friday, April 11th
• Thursday, April 17th
• Friday, April 18th

Fridays would be preferable, because they give us the ability to catch up with the increased load during the weekend. Please comment on this blog post to let us know the day that would be best for you. Thank you!

We’ve created a spreadsheet of the issues we felt would be worth having fixed in the next 3 months.  Beside each issue is a priority number which corresponds to the description in the legend.  If something isn’t on the list and you think it should be, or if you think a priority on an item is incorrect, please let us know ASAP, so we can discuss it and make a decision about it before we choose the list of issues we’d like to ask Jive to fix.

Spreadsheet is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ptjORwt3Bhd3zdNMyhTzgMw

Reply to this blog posting with any feedback. Ideally the list is finalized Friday.

As the, fairly lengthy, title of this post indicates we’re having a phone meeting to hash out which bugs and missing features in the Live Chat software are most important, or are giving us the most trouble currently.  The goal of this meeting will be to create a list of the most important fixes we’d like to see so that we can discuss them with the software’s developers at Jive.

The meeting will be tonight (Tuesday, Feb 19th) at 7PM EST/4PM PST

Call in details will be the same as our weekly meetings, except we’ll use conference room 309#

• California: 650-903-0800 then extension 91
• Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 91
• Toll-free: 800-707-2533 then password 369

Then, enter the conference number: 309#

IRC channel: #livechat (please join this if you are able, it makes linking to documents etc much easier)

We’ll be looking at this list of missing features and bugs in the current software, making sure it’s current and prioritizing each item to figure out which fixes we would like to have taken care of in the next 3 months.

For those that can’t make the meeting, we’ll link to the list we ended up with at the end of the meeting and more feedback will be welcome.

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

• 1pm to 4pm
• 7pm to 9pm PST (GMT -8)

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.

I posted earlier about our system for doing Live Chat approvals. Unfortunately this fell apart for two reasons. First being, I’m the only one who can flip the switch on accounts. Second being, most new helpers were coming around after hours, which is great, that’s when we need more helpers, but that also meant I wasn’t around. We quickly realized this wasn’t going to work.

The ideal solution needed to take several things into account:

1. New helpers shouldn’t be able to open help without a Room Monitor to supervise
2. They need to be able to get to users without waiting for me to approve them
3. They need to see the same UI as they would in a regular help chat

We stuck our heads together, and came up with what we think will be a working solution. So with many apologies to those who signed up and were never approved, here’s how it works now.

1. Sign up for an account though the Spark client as always. Instead of being automatically added to the support group, or having to wait for approval, you’ll now be added to a “trainees” group.
2. Join the Contributors conference. Let people know that you’re new and would like to be invited to help chats. You can also let us know in #livechat on irc.mozilla.org
3. Watch for invitations to join help chats. When we’re open and taking requests, the trainees group will be invited to shadow these chats using the same alerts and UI that you’ll see when taking requests yourself.
4. Help out a few requests to learn the ropes. Once you’ve followed and helped with enough chats to pick up how things work, the helpers you’ve been working with will let me know that you’re ready to help users on your own. I’ll add people to the support team when I’m around. This will usually be within 24 hours of being told you’re ready.

If you’ve already signed up for an account but were never approved, please let me know here, send me or someone else a message on Spark, or let someone know on IRC. I’ll make sure to take care of these accounts ASAP. Again, I apologize whole heartedly for the process fail. Please let us know if there are still issues with the new process.

If this is new to you and you’d like to help out, get started here.

For those of you not yet familiar with the new Live Chat software, we have it set that while everyone can sign up for an account to help, only people who have been approved can actually take questions from users. Last week we didn’t do any new approvals, and we apologize for the delay to those of you who have been signed up and waiting patiently. The software is new to us as well and we took the time to familiarize ourselves with the user control options that are available (and which ones aren’t). This helps give us an idea of how many approvals we can do at once, while still making sure we’re providing a quality service to our users.

We’re doing new approvals this week, so if you’d like to help, drop by during our hours of operation. We’ll only be doing a few at a time so that we can monitor new helpers, and guide them. If you have any questions you can find us either via the conference feature in the product, or drop by #sumo on irc.mozilla.org.

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!

Yesterday, we had our first test day for the upcoming Live Chat component of Firefox Support.  It was a wonderful success. Having so many people come out and stick around for the amount of time they did really let us get a handle on all the features and how things will work when we go live.  While we found that most things work as expected, we did end up finding a good number of small things that we’d missed in our previous testing. In the lead up to going live we’ll be taking the list of issues we found, fixing some of them on our end, improving our documents, and filing bugs upstream with the software provider.

We want to say a HUGE thank you to all the people who turned up today.  We couldn’t have done it without your help.  Everyone that turned up — no matter for how long — really helped, and we appreciate it very much.  We hope we’ll see you all back as we get closer to going live.  If you missed the test day, but still want to check it out, feel free to stop by #sumo on Mozilla’s IRC network and we’ll get you set up.

Today, December 21st, from 1 PM - 6 PM PST, we’d like as many people as possible to test both the software that helpers will use to interact with users, as well as the web interface that users will use to reach help. We need your help to make sure we’ve fixed, or are at least aware of, any kinks.

What we need to test

We’ll be testing both sides if the Live Chat experience:

• the software for Firefox helpers, and
• the web solution for people needing help.

Preferably, people will test both the Spark software as a helper and the web client as an end-user at the same time, so they can see if their actions caused the desired results.  You are more than welcome, though, to only pose as a user, or only test out the Spark client!

See our testing page for more info on what to test and how to report your findings.

What you need to get started

If you’d like to help test the Spark client as a helper, you need to download and configure the client. Once you create an account you’ll be able to use the Spark client right away to chat with other helpers. See this page for instructions on using Spark.

If you’d like to test the web client for users, all you have to do is go to our start page and click on the Foxkeh to launch the chat window, fill in the required fields, and submit the question. See our Live Chat user start page.

Getting help and giving feedback

There are several places you can ask for help, more information, or give feedback about Live Chat.

• For real-time help come see us in #sumo on Mozilla’s IRC network.
• If you’re logged in to the server with the Spark client, you can use it to chat with other people who are logged in as well. On the test day check for a “conference room.”
• To leave feedback, or for less pressing questions, feel free to use the newsgroup or leave a comment comment on this blog post.

Thanks for your help!

We’re getting close to opening the Live Chat portion of support.mozilla.com, and we’re very excited about that.  We’ve chosen a complete software solution that allows users to access one-on-one support through a web applet, but provides helpers with a full featured client that allows them to choose which questions they think they can answer, and call in more helpers for questions they can’t.

Very soon, we’ll be having a test day and we’d like to invite all of you to help us out.  You can test the helper client and see what it’ll be like to answer users’ questions.  You can test the web app to make sure it’s easy for people to use in all browsers. We’d love for people to test both at the same time, then you can really see how each action works for the helper and the user.

If you’re interested, look back here for more details, or come see us in #sumo on irc.mozilla.org for more information on how and when.