This is a quick reminder about our test day for private messaging and group dashboards today, Friday, July 8th, from 3pm to 12pm UTC. We want to test the recently finished implementation of private messaging and the groups dashboards on SUMO, and will meet on IRC, in #testday (please note, it’s not #sumo).

Especially for private messaging it’s important to have many people on IRC at the same time. So if you can manage it, please join us between 3pm and 7pm UTC , but of course we will be around all day. Also, we have a test plan ready, so you can systematically check if things are working as they should.

If you are a localizer, you can also request the group dashboard feature. This will add another tab to your dashboard and those of your team members. That tab will hold your localization dashboard and a message on top that you as the locale leader can change to message your team. Also, your localization group will get a profile page listing the locale leader and every member of the team. You can see here what the German localization group profile looks like.

For the groups dashboard I wrote a short tutorial that you can see here.

Please report any issues that you encounter on this etherpad so we can fix them quickly.

All info about the testday:

Date: Friday, July 8th
Time: 3pm to 12pm UTC
Place: IRC #testday (please note, it’s not #sumo)
Testplan: https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Execution/Web_Testing/SUMO/2.8
Feedback: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/kitsune-groups-and-messages

Thanks, and hope to see you later today!

Starting today we will be beta testing the new groups and private messaging features of Kitsune. We want to start with a small number of people for now, so we are going to cap this at about ten. We will have a test day for everyone on July 8th. If you are interested in testing private messaging and giving feedback on it, please let me know in this thread on the support community forum and I’ll activate it for you.

If you are a localizer, you can also request the group dashboard feature. This will add another tab to your dashboard and those of your team members. That tab will hold your localization dashboard and a message on top that you as the locale leader can change to message your team. Also, your localization group will get a profile page listing the locale leader and every member of the team.

You can see here what the German localization group profile looks like.

For the groups dashboard I wrote a short tutorial that you can see here.

Private messaging should be fairly intuitive. Once the feature is activated, just click on “Inbox” on the upper right corner of the page. Make sure that you only message people who are listed in the forum thread for now.

Please report any issues that you encounter on this etherpad so we can fix them quickly.

And of course, please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!
Kadir

We recently introduced or are going to introduce several new features and processes in preparation for the new schedule. If you’re a localizer I’d like to talk with you about that in an IRC meeting on Wednesday, June 1, at 9am PDT. The topics will be:

• The new archive feature
• The new “ready for localization” flag
• Tracking of upcoming changes to articles
• Weekly releases of the SUMO software and strings (KB/forums, etc)
• New SUMO features like group dashboards and private messaging

Please try to take part in this meeting, so we can answer any open questions and incorporate your feedback. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions here or add topics to the agenda if I have missed anything. Hope to see you all soon!

Info about the meeting:
Date: Wednesday, June 1st
Time: 9am PDT
Place: IRC #sumomtg

Last weekend was the second installment of the Balkans meeting, and this time it was much more hands-on oriented. We had the full day on Saturday to cover a whole range of subjects from SUMO, product L10n, QA to Add-on development. For SUMO this year was a year of changes in many aspects, and during my talk I used the chance to explain why we did what we did, and how we thought it would bring us closer to support each and every one of our 400 Million users worldwide.

The second half of the day was reserved for sprints and hands-on action. Since we had just released a brand new KB, this was an excellent opportunity to see the KB used in real live, and learn from the feedback. The participants worked mostly on the top 20 articles in the KB, which serve almost 50% of all visitors to the KB and have a really high benefit-cost ratio.

Particularly interesting was the feedback, most of it about the actual localization experience in the editor. Generally it was geared towards making the editor more user friendly (smaller fonts for more text, resizing of the editor window etc) and the localization experience smoother. In the latter case we are looking into a few ways to do that already, for example by providing a Google translated text as the base for the initial translation of the English text.

After a pretty solid 9 hours of work we headed for dinner in a traditional Slovenian Restaurant, with horse meat as a specialty. I didn’t try that, but my meal was delicious. There we also met our surprise guest for the evening, the new Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, who was adopted as a Balkan member for his Hungarian heritage

Working hard during the SUMO sprint

After the hands-on the day before, Sunday was used for the goal setting process, which involved a review of the goals from the last time and their usefulness. The goal setting itself was pretty great, we had an etherpad where we collected the goals, the document was projected to the big screen then and live edited by a dozen people, which made for interesting discussions.

I’m happy to say that the Balkan communities decided to name the localization of the Top 20 SUMO articles into all Balkan languages as one of those goals, and I think the new KB had quite some influence here. There will be follow up calls to talk about the details of each goal, but all in all they look pretty good, and will surely give everyone enough to work on until the next Balkans meeting (I heard rumors about Athens, but who knows

My cell in Ljubljana

So, how did I end up in a cell? Well, that was thanks to Matjaz, our wonderful host from Slovenia. He organize a hostel for the participants, but not just any hostel, it was a former military prison, taken over by university students and turned into a hostel, with the cells left intact and designed by different architects. It’s considered one of the best hostels worldwide, and I can really recommend spending a night behind bars, it’s unusual to say the least

I’d like to thank everyone attending this years Balkan meeting, it was a pleasure to meet and work with you all, and special thanks to our host Mathjaz and the organizers, William and Milos, it was a productive and intense meeting, but with lots of opportunities for informal talks and get-togethers. I really enjoyed it, thanks for putting it all together!

We started working on our new SUMO Knowledge Base back in March and now, 9 months later, it’s finally here! We released our new KB to the public last night and it’s working great. Go check it out: http://support.mozilla.com. And come back for a localization sprint tomorrow (more about that below).

We are really excited, exhausted and extremely happy — this was a huge undertaking. After the months of planning and development, we spent the last few weeks testing the migration of thousands of articles to our new system. The good news is that all of that testing payed off. Thanks to everyone who contributed during the QA day, and other times, the migration went smooth, with no catastrophic problems whatsoever. Alas, no matter how much you test, you never catch all the issues. So, we are dedicating the next few days to finding and solving the little bugs we’ve found. Please let us know about any issues in #sumo or #sumodev on IRC or — better yet — file a bug so we can take care of it.

Localization Sprint

A new system always poses a lot of questions, especially for those who need to work with it. So we decided to have a Localization sprint to check our top articles and update or translate articles for Firefox 4. If you are a localizer, this gives you the chance to check your top 20 articles and report any issue to us right away. This way, we can try to solve it on the spot. It will also give you hands-on experience with the new KB for updating or translating articles for Firefox 4. And we’ll be ready on IRC to answer any questions about the syntax, templates (formerly, content blocks) or anything else. And we need your help, even if you’re not a localizer: All those newy imported articles need a search summary to show up on the search results page. Help us add those summaries.

Join us on Thursday, December 2nd. The sprint will start at 6am PST and last until 2pm PST. That’s 3pm to 11pm in Central Europe, or 2pm to 10pm UTC/GMT – yeah, we’re a global project

Looking forward to seeing you all and putting the new KB to the test!

There are so many exciting parts to the new Knowledge Base that it’s hard to know what to talk about first. The biggest improvement was also the most requested – speed. With our old KB it was often hard to find out why pages timed out and even harder to actually do anything about it. With the new system we know every detail and can tweak the performance, move things around and make sure that users will see a page in an instant. As has been shown time and time again, speed is the ultimate measure of usefulness. Even a 3 second response time will often lead to users leaving the site or being unsatisfied with the interaction no matter how good the content. So we’ve focused heavily on this.

The latest numbers we have show a huge improvement in response times – to be precise, a 28-fold increase in handled requests per second! That’s incredible indeed. The best part is that it will make the KB more useful for users as well as contributors. Gone are the days of timed out dashboards and slow loading pages.

What you can do!

Of course speed is not the only improvement with this new system. Over the next few weeks leading up to the release, we will write more about specific new features and improvements. But you don’t have to wait for the November 30th release to see for yourself. Take a look at the work-in-progress on our staging server.

If you are interested, help us make it as bug free as possible by joining us for a QA day on November 12th. From 8am to 5pm PST we’ll gather in #sumo on IRC to make sure the KB is ready for the release. We’d love to see you there!

SUMO has 5 million visitors every week. That’s a lot of people who hopefully are happy Firefox users again after leaving our site. And while we have hundreds of articles for almost any issue, the top 20 articles do account for almost 50% of all traffic to the Knowledge Base. That means we need to make sure those articles  are as easy to understand and as helpful as possible. Today we are starting a test with the top 5 articles. Our awesome tech editor, Michael Verdi, just rewrote those articles to make sure that more people get help directly with the articles so less people need to ask in the forums or leave without getting the needed help.

In Michael’s own words:

There is a lot of information out there on the kinds of things that make technical writing engaging and effective. Much of it has been popularized by Kathy Sierra on her blog, Creating Passionate Users and put into practice in the Head First book series that she created for O’Reilly. I think many (but not all) of these techniques apply to the kinds of things we write for the knowledge base and I’m attempting to work out how we can use them to make our articles more helpful. Hopefully this will result in more people getting their questions and problems taken care of in the Knowledge Base without having to go to the Support Forums or Live Chat.

If the new versions of the articles turn out to be more helpful than the old ones, we will keep updating more articles on SUMO in the future. If not, we’ll revert back to the old versions to avoid unnecessary localization work. So if you are a localizer you can just wait for the outcome of the test before you start rewriting your aricles. But to be honest: We are pretty confident that Michael’s work is going to help a lot more users And of course you can rewrite your articles and test them as well. Our poll data article explains how.

Starting this month, Microsoft will be rolling out the EU browser ballot across Europe. Instead of having Microsoft make the browser choice for every Windows user, people will finally be able to decide for themselves which browser they would like to use.

It’s likely that we will see an increase of Firefox users in Europe visiting the Firefox Support website because of the browser ballot, and it’s also important to note that many of these users will probably be less experienced with computers. As a result, support is going to play a key role in helping these new users understand how to use Firefox.

We wanted to take advantage of this unique opportunity and be prepared for these new users. One way we did that was to focus on a small set of key articles, and simplify them so novice users will have a better chance of understanding them.
Those articles are:

• How to set the home page
• Importing favorites and other data from Internet Explorer
• How to make Firefox the default browser
• For Internet Explorer Users
• Installing the Flash plugin

We also wanted to make sure that the same improvements were made on the translated versions. Our goal was to work with our l10n community to ensure that the top 5 languages in Europe had those articles up to date, which would cover about 70% of the users.

But as we started to talk about this effort with European communities, even more locales wanted to join us to have the  improved support content available in their language as well. So, thanks to the hard work from our amazing localizers in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic, our support content is now covering over 80% of users in Europe!

However, there’s still time to have the content translated into your language! If you would like to see the content available in your language, we would love to help get you started. We’ve prepared a page explaining how to translate the content, and if you have any questions, just ask in the Contributors forum or the #sumo IRC channel.

The browser ballot will affect the browser choice of millions of people in Europe. If you can, please help our new users have a great first experience with Firefox.

The English update – this week

• All updates to English articles will be done manually. If you would like to help, just pick a section in the Mozilla wiki page, and update the articles listed in it.
  • We will not be displaying Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 content separately (i.e. using SHOWFOR).
  • We will be using the “Mark other translations as out of date” checkbox when approving edits for 3.6. This will make the articles appear in the “Needs Updating” section of the Localization Dashboard, so localizers will know which translations are ready to be updated.
  • For screenshots, use Firefox 3.6 Beta 3.
• We will also be creating a new article that walks users through the information they see in the new Troubleshooting Information page (a.k.a. about:support). (bug 528112)

Localization – now until release

• Localizers will need to rename their translations of the “Options window – Main Panel” article, because the Main panel has been renamed to General. The new English article name is “Options window – General panel“. After your translation is renamed, create a translation of Options window – Main Panel which will redirect to your previous URL.
• A list of articles to update will appear in the “Needs Updating” section of the Localization Dashboard.
• Once the “Using the Troubleshooting Information page” article is approved, it will need to be translated as well.

A good way to get started, is to go through the list of articles that mention the “Main panel“, and change them to “General panel (Main panel in Firefox 3.5)”. If you have any questions, just ask in the Contributors forum thread. Thank you!

In February, we asked support localizers to add links to their local forums when localizing the Ask a question page, which tells users where to go if they cannot find the answer to their question in the knowledge base. We would like to do something similar with the How to Contribute page, which is where users interested in contributing to Firefox Support are directed. In the localized versions of the How to Contribute page, we can not only direct users to the appropriate local community sites, but include info for new contributors to directly contact their community leaders.

We have been working with the Italian locale leader to create a localized version of the How to Contribute page. In fact, it is now up for everyone to see.

We would like to all localized versions of the How to Contribute page to follow the example set on the Italian page. Here are the main points:

• A note was added after the first paragraph inviting new contributors to their local community site.
• Links to pages about helping in the support.mozilla.com forum and live chat are marked as English-only.
• The contact info section is divided into two parts: the first is contact info links for the contributor’s locale, and the second is for the English links.

As usual, if you have any questions, just post in the Contributors forum.