Firefox Support Blog

Attendes: djst, cilias, zzxc, cww, nkoth, lucy

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Bug 455190 made the poll stats unreliable; should be fixed starting from last week’s push. cilias to verify and report to nkoth if there are still problems.
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • People stuck on looping update messages. Probably a prefs.js locked problem. lucy to look up more info.
• Logo feedback gathered in newsgroup thread. If you haven’t provided feedback yourself, please do it asap!
• “Are the links on the front page detracting people from using search?” discussion on mozilla.support.planning [1]
• Search box in the top nav performs a mozilla.com site specific search, not a SUMO search [2]. djst to look up how many people search there on SUMO, if possible. If not, we’ll probably just remove the search box.

Knowledge Base

• Bugzilla: 2 new article bugs [3][4], 1 bug verified fixed [5]
• Firefox 3.1 changes [6]

Live Chat

• Top live chat issues, several need investigation or more information
• 4 new chat accounts, 1 account approval: auswddn
• We are now following up chats in the forum after the user understands what to do. That way we can reduce the average chat session length, become more effective, while still providing high class support for our users. All chat helpers should search the forum for their name after helping, to catch followups.

SFD

• E-mail sent to localizers, early feedback
  • Fix bugs that prevent widespread adoption of SUMO first before asking localizers to help en masse.
  • Goal should be to get more people (isn’t it always?) and increase communication between locales/en-US
  • Would like info on how to get started translating and keeping translations up to date
• Decide a day for the event next week

Attendees: djst, cilias, zzxc, cww, nkoth

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • First week of collecting metrics from Omniture instead of Urchin, which explains some differences in the numbers
  • All team members set up with access to Omniture; need to schedule meeting with the one and only (Mr Ken Kovash) to get a good introduction
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Got poll count data from the Knowledge Base thanks to Laura. Need to integrate it with the rest of the data. Also, we probably want to look at No votes as well, assuming the majority of the people that vote No do so because they tried the instructions but they didn’t work. Moreover, the data is skewed because of the site traffic (e.g. in-product help articles get higher vote counts).

Knowledge Base

• Bugzilla: 2 new article requests [1][2], 1 article bug verified fixed [3]
• Disable Smart Location Bar article is renamed
• Which in-product articles need to change for Firefox 3.1? cilias to get back with info around this.

Support Forum

• More threads, less answers. We currently have around 55% of threads replied to, but no way of determining whether or not the replies were actually an attempt to solve the problem. For this, we need new performance metrics, which is part of SUMO 0.8. Specifically, we need to be able to tell “me too” replies apart from replies that actually try to help the original poster.

Live Chat

• Traffic down again, answer rate >60% — steadily improving as traffic calms down
• Common issues: in weekly issues thread
• New hours, Helping with Live Chat updated
• About 5 new accounts last week, 0 account approvals
• Need more people to connect after-hours to chat-support.mozilla.com (with any Jabber client)
  • Any instructions on how to connect with Jabber client?–cilias 16:48, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
• Anyone who can help us out in Live Chat this week, please sign up on the live chat coverage page to help us plan it better. Thanks!

Attendees: djst, cilias, zzxc, cww, lucy

Sumo

• Localizer feedback
• Weekly metrics
  • Less traffic this week, and less community involvement
• Weekly support issues
  • For Hendrix, we have an experimental database built now that sorts each post into a category so it’ll be easy to pull up the raw data now and collect information with a simple SQL query. Cww will be putting in all the info from the support forums as well pending bug 455790. Once this is done, we’ll have a form where we can look up everyone who has a certain issue.
  • By far the most common issue right now is people being confused about the Awesome Bar not appearing to erase their history
    • Evidence that many people report this in the Forum as well. Many people are asking how to downgrade to Firefox 2.0.0.x
    • We have a downgrading to Firefox 2 article, but we need to add a paragraph explaining why downgrading is a bad idea, and how people can disable the Awesome Bar functionality anyway if they really need to

Knowledge Base

• Bugzilla: no activity (all around pretty quiet week)
  • remember to add user-doc-needed to bugs that require changes in documentation or new documentation
• Add-ons policy
  • Policies page is updated, but could improvement. [1]
  • New content block: label=amo
  • Add-on links have been removed from most articles with some exceptions. Dynamic content still needs to be applied. cilias will work on implementing this for related articles this week.
• List of top articles for translation: [2]
• Looking for suggestions on how to get more approvers to review other people’s edits [3]
  • djst thinks we need to make the review queue more obvious to contributors — need a good contributor start page and make sure we direct people who log in to that page
• We should remove instructions on how to completely disable all history in the Awesome Bar. Very few people actually want that, and we also have evidence of people thinking they broke Firefox when applying that “fix”

Support Forum

• Traffic slightly down, by ~ 15-20%

Live Chat

• Traffic down; chat requests down almost 30%
• 2 new accounts created, 0 account approvals
• New common issues: crashes (crash-stats still down, bug 455999), yahoo toolbar causes window jumping, Firefox 3 “crashes entire computer”, default browser corrupted/wrong browser launches on Windows

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Most popular articles list not accurate (see bug)
• This week is the first time we share the weekly common issues list during the SUMO meeting. It’s a chance to make sure everyone can provide their feedback and additional info, and verify that we’re seeing the same things. This way, we have a better list to present to the rest of Mozilla on the Wednesday Firefox 3.1 meeting.

Knowledge Base

• Bugzilla: 2 article bugs filed [1][2], 1 article bug verified fixed [3]
• Still gathering feedback on new editor.
• New start page for Firefox Support localizers [4].
• Policy on linking to add-ons discussion in mozilla.support.planning [5].
  • We don’t want to link directly to add-ons, as that gives a false impression that we’re supporting them
  • We should, however, promote one of the strongest features of Firefox — it’s extensibility. We can do that without endorsing any specific extensions.
• What to do with out of date/obsolete pages — cilias to start a discussion this week

Forums

• Forums are still slow but not throwing database errors.
• Participation is up this week, yay!
  • 775 replies by contribs, this week 1775
  • cww to verify the stats, as it looks like the participation doubled…

Live Chat

• zzxc is without power today, Cww in charge of livechat for the day, pulling stats.

Norton 360

• Main thread: [6]
• Call with Symantec on Wed to finalize suggested workarounds. cww and zzxc to call in.
• cilias to review zzxc’s edit to the Norton 360 article

Attendees: djst, cilias, zzxc, cww, nkoth, myles7897

Sumo

• Welcome to the team, Matthew (zzxc) and Cheng (cww)! [1]
• Gathering/reporting top issues
  • cww has been reading forum threads and e-mail
  • zzxc has helped with Live Chat logs
  • Need more people to monitor the data, especially the forum — cww to approach forum moderators about it first
  • We need to get the hard numbers of the poll “Did this article solve a problem?” — current % stats is useless to determine which are our most common problems — cww to ask np about getting a quick query run on a weekly basis until we can get this implemented and run automatically
  • Idea: categorize problems similar to the RRRT did it
• Weekly metrics
  • When will we be using Omniture? Need to get team members set up to access it, then learn the system. Possibly schedule a quick meeting with our metrics guru Ken to get our questions answered. :)
• Norton 360 (bug 452469) - new instructions up in Bookmarks and toolbar buttons not working after upgrading based on info from tomcat
  • 30% of people gets their problem solved with that article.
  • Working with QA to investigate this further. Rebooting works temp. firefox.exe never closes.

Knowledge Base

• Bugzilla: 4 new article bugs [2], 2 article bugs fixed [3][4]
• Need to work on print problems article - cilias & zzxc to work together to make sure we’re covering all issues people are reporting
• In case you missed it We now have notification of when a new translation is created.
• A How to Contribute start page for localizers would be nice, listing things like how to translate the interface, articles, enabling new article notifications, etc — cilias to start working on this
• Gathering feedback and suggestions for new article editor. [5]

Forums

• High traffic
• Really slow performance
• Most Popular Thread list now only includes the last few weeks’ popularity, which actually makes the list useful :) Should be renamed Most visited Threads.
• RSS feed for a whole forum, similar to Mozilla’s intranet forum? Functionality exists in TikiWiki, but we need to test it for db load etc. Cww to file a bug.

Live Chat

• Traffic still high from MU release, helpers get burned out quickly, ca 822 chats
• 56% of chats answered — new record since Firefox 3 release!
• 6 new accounts last week
• Notes/status on a sample of ~70 chats
  • Top issues: bookmarks in location bar, Norton 360 locks places.sqlite, Firefox crashes, Firefox will not start, some printer drivers print garbage text, lost bookmarks
• Contributors conference now proxied to #sumo thanks to mzz’s bot

Attendees: djst, Cww, cilias, np

Sumo

• Cww is in MV this week! Sitting in the conf room with djst.
• Proposed goals for Q3:
  • Establish formal feedback loop to QA/dev about user’s most common Firefox problems
  • Develop performance & customer satisfaction metrics to determine our quality of support
  • Get better understanding of how people are using SUMO to further improve the site — are people searching? what do they search for? what’s the usage ratio of the KB vs user-to-user support offerings?
  • Make the support forum helpful and easy to use for both contributors and users (SUMO 0.7 milestone)
  • Plan, design, and develop improved search engine to replace the one currently used in SUMO
• New milestone scheme — instead of major 0.x milestones and ad hoc production server pushes, we’re switching to minor 0.0.x milestones on a bi-weekly basis
  • This gives us and IT better control, and allows for more structured scheduling
  • The overall 0.x milestones will still be kept, but they will be fixed incrementally. E.g. 0.7 will be preceded by 0.6.1, 0.6.2, etc.

Knowledge Base

• Survey results and analysis are posted in mozilla.support.planning [1]. Lots of good feedback that we should digest, e.g.:
  • UI of article editor confusing — djst has been in contact with Alain Désilets of TikiWiki about what things need improvement in terms of usability. Should definitely share this feedback with Alain.
  • cilias to provide a condensed list of UI/l10n specific feedback and report to djst
• Bugzilla: 4 new article requests [2], 1 article bug fixed [3].

Forums

• Similar traffic as last week. No stats this week.
• np still has some access problems in getting to use the db dumbs for stats analysis. Will comment in bug report about it.
• One of our biggest problems today is that most users post anonymously, and we have little knowledge of how many of those users actually find their way back to the thread they posted when someone responds to it. This is something we will fix with the 0.7 milestone by sending out an e-mail notification to the original poster whenever someone responds to a thread. The OP should then be able to either:
  • Select “Yes, this response solved my problem,” which would mark the thread as solved, or
  • Select “No, this response did not solve my problem,” which would take the user back to the thread so he/she can provide more info
• This will likely dramatically increase the number of users getting their problems solved, and it will also allow us to confirm that we’re doing a good job (customer satisfaction metrics).

Live Chat

• Cww, zzxc, and cilias can all help with covering the shifts for this week. np can’t really help out because of his full-time job that conflicts with the hours of operation.
• cilias has some good feedback about the Live Chat process since he views it from a different perspective than the people who have already used it. Will provide feedback and share with team.
• More generally, getting feedback from new contributors is something we should focus more on. Actively ask contributors if there are things they find confusing, and pay attention to what questions we receive from contributors/localizers.

Attendees: djst, cilias, np, lucy, nkoth, zzxc

Sumo

• New theme went live last week — please file bugs if you see any problems (but please search first, as there have been a lot of them filed already!) :)
• 0.6 release this week — Wednesday or Thursday during a downtime window is the plan
• New weekly dev meeting every Tuesday at 9 AM PDT, where we’ll focus on bug triaging, assigning, and milestone planning.
• Weekly metrics
  • Second most searched term is “clear history” — pretty high chance this is about the AwesomeBar. Suggest adding links about it from the Clearing Location Bar results article to make sure people are aware of what they’re seeing

Knowledge Base

• Launch week was the most active week in the KB ever, including both new articles written and number of article edits and contributors
• Bugzilla:
  • Week of Firefox 3: 11 article requests [1], 17 article bugs fixed [2]
  • Last week: 3 article requests [3][4][5], 4 article bugs fixed [6]
• Hoping to unlock in-product articles this week so people can keep improving them. They were locked during l10n string freeze to minimize the workload for localizers, but now it’s time to open it up again.

Forums

• Got stats for the past couple weeks - 5000 threads last week, 3500 this week
• Many new contributors, though some are probably one time users.
• New really helpful contributor: alterna! Over 100 posts already. Welcome alterna! :)

Live Chat

• Still getting a fair number of new accounts post-release
• Several approvals since release
  • maniac, mzz, phreakyphotographer, wolfwindshadow, silentme
  • more should be ready this week
• New hours while Cww is away
• Need to start looking at moving to the open source plug-ins [7]
• Follow-up on pref to add more admin accounts
  • djst to bring this up in tomorrow’s sumo dev meeting
• zzxc (Matthew) and mzz are working on adding Fastpath support to gajim
  • zzxc to document what’s needed from IT and what the plan and progress is
• Lucy be away and unreachable July 9th - 20th - Do we close or can others cover?
  • cilias and np might be able to cover a few shifts. Lucy to send out e-mail with planned hours of operation so we can figure it out.

Attendees: djst, lucy, nkoth, zzxc, cww, Collin_1000

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Significantly increased traffic from Firefox 3, as expected
  • Servers held up generally well (at least not worse than any other service!)
  • Traffic has dropped steadily since launch day, but will definitely increase rapidly again as we start rolling out the automatic updates
  • New calculation of top polls. Previous results were only using the top 30 polls. New results use any en-US articles with over 20 results
  • Can’t load action log screen to get stats
• Firefox 3
  • Generally the approach to escalate common security issues regarding Firefox 3 worked well. See also separate blog post about that.
  • Jason: working on getting stats on most common issues. Tiki not being co-operative.
  • Possible stats:
    • Most visited articles (Urchin)
    • Most voted on articles (Tiki)
    • Most helpful articles, based on number of votes (Tiki)
    • Articles/external URLs linked to most often in forums (Tiki)
• SFD3 feedback
  • The general approach of using a single page hosting both IRC channel for chat, and Mogulus for all workshops worked really well
  • A lot less confusion about where events were hosted, and a lot less work on updating IRC status messages, wiki pages with schedules, etc.
  • Mogulus also gave us the ability to see how many people were participating (up to 45 people!), and people could be logging in before an event started
  • Thanks to Cww for figuring out how Mogulus and desktop sharing worked in Windows, and to Dietrich for doing the same on the Mac!
  • Figuring out the exact time requirements for the individual events can be tricky — should figure out what we can fill the channel with when there’s no live content going
  • In summary, we got around 6-10 more live chat contributors and a few more forum contributors
• Status of Google SoC projects
  • The screenshot annotation project is going really well, with most requirements already fully defined and a student working very hard to always stay ahead of me (djst, the mentor). :)
  • The Search project hasn’t really started yet because the student has been busy with exams, but we have figured out a reasonable scope and will have a meeting with the student this Wednesday. He has pretty solid approaches on the problems so things look promising. nkoth is the mentor.

Knowledge Base

• cilias couldn’t make it to today’s meeting, but we covered the important bits above (important issues with Firefox 3 were looped back into the KB and promoted to the start page)

Forums

• Big thanks to all those who helped in the forum. There were a lot of questions posted, but we got through it well.
• Bo and cor-el now over 10,000 posts!! A huge thanks to these amazing guys.
• Some intermittent bugs with the forum - pages showing up with a different stylesheet, new posts not reflected immediately, can’t delete posts…

Live Chat

• In a normal week, about 300 live chat requests are answered. Last week over 1000 were answered!! Really incredible effort by the community.
• 46 new accounts
• Updated server software to 3.5.2 last night
• Time to start hacking group — people from the Live Chat community are interested in coding. Lucy and djst to approach Jive devs for a good peer reviewer to get us started.
• Lucy to post requirements doc for scheduling software ideas on the wiki

Attendees: djst, cilias, Lucy, nkoth, laura, zzxc, Cww

Sumo

• Performance update from Laura
  • Memcache fixes are now in production
  • Still waiting for master/slave bug to be fixed; laura to bug morgamic about review
  • Once that is in production, we should be able to switch back to using SUMO as in-product help for Firefox 3 (likely target: Wednesday)
  • Forum is still not cached. We’ll likely not have that in time for release, but Laura will investigate
• Last week of Firefox Screencast Contest
  • Received a pretty good number of submissions so far, but we need more!
  • Will blog about the contest throughout the week
• Support Firefox Day
  • Consensus that an SFD closely after the Firefox 3 release would be helpful as we’ll have the traffic to reel people in to being contributors
  • Before release, make sure we have sufficient documentation for contributors and blog about the need for people to help out during launch
  • Lucy to start the discussion in the newsgroup today
• Weekly metrics
  • KB contribution spike because cilias has been updating articles for Firefox 3
  • Omniture is now working on SUMO! Need to investigate the possibilities but it’s certainly an improvement compared to Urchin
  • Among other things, we can monitor specific articles for traffic and create triggers if we get spikes. This would allow us to keep track of e.g. articles involving viruses/trojans/malware for Firefox.
• Site redesign is underway, led by Brian Krausz from webdev. djst and nkoth to have a meeting today to discuss any open issues and check in on status.
• New Contributor Home Page is up.

Knowledge Base

• Bugzilla:
  • Week before last: 5 new article requests [1], 4 article bugs fixed [2].
  • Last week: 4 new article requests [3], 5 article bugs fixed [4]
• All articles that should be using SHOWFOR or Dynamic Content are using them.
• All articles that should be in the Firefox 3 category are there.
• All article text has been updated for Firefox 3.
• Almost all new articles for Firefox are done.
• All we have left for Firefox 3 is screenshots.
  • There is a discussion in the Contributors forum about screenshot policy, in terms of if/where do we limit the size of articles, and how to prioritize which SHOWFOR classes are more important (Firefox 2 vs. Firefox 3 on Mac/Linux)
  • Discussion about using AJAX to dynamically load screenshots. This would eliminate the concern about having too many screenshots if we want to support different OSes. A bug is filed for this (but I can’t find it! anyone?)
• Other Firefox Support was redone to include other web sites.
  • To clarify, this is the page where other locales can provide links to their local community websites.

Forums

• np couldn’t attend today’s meeting, but the most critical aspect of forum is performance, which we discussed earlier.
• “Question answered” feature implemented. The next step is to make sure only threads marked as answered are shown in search results.

Live Chat

• Scheduling PRD draft discussion has been going on in an email thread. Lucy to move it out to a wiki page and include an introduction/description to make it easier for people to provide feedback.
• We’re going to have a pre-release meeting with Live Chat helpers before the release to make sure any open issues are covered and all questions answered. Friday this week? Lucy to make a decision tomorrow.
• Work on adding documentation for what we’re still missing about Live Chat to make sure the information is crystal clear for release. For example, how to deal with supporting Mac/Linux users when the helper is running Windows.

After having a few chances to speak together on the phone, our Live Chat contributors agreed it was something we should do more often.  On that note, I’d like to invite you all to our first open meeting dedicated to Live Chat.

We’ll discuss things like common issues that are coming up with users, problems we’ve been having with missing or out of date documentation, and suggestions we have for making it easier to help users.

If you’ve had any experiences with Live Chat you’re welcome to join us and share your thoughts.

The meeting time is tentatively set for 12pm PDT (GMT -7)/3pm EDT (GMT -4). Look back Wednesday for a confirmed time as well as call-in details.

If you have any questions in the mean time you can always find us in #livechat on irc.mozilla.org