Firefox Support Blog

The SUMO contributors have all worked incredibly hard to make our user-to-user support experiences for our users positive. Today they will need our help in order to maintain the quality, as the services will explode with new Firefox 3 users. Below are three ways you can make a difference to the hard working contributors as well as our new users.

Even if you only have a few minutes to spare, your effort can help one, two, three, or ten new users.

Super Easy

• Monitor the support forum for unanswered questions — Just browse through the list of questions and see if there is anything you know the answer to. You don’t even have to have an account, although I recommend you get one anyway to show who you are.
• Hang out in #livechat on irc.mozilla.org — Other Live Chat helpers may find you there and ping you to help them out in case they run into a hard question. You don’t have to participate in helping users directly, just answering questions other Live Chat helpers might have.

Relatively Easy

• Help users directly in Live Chat — Actually it’s not that hard, but it’s definitely more time consuming than the other ways of helping out. Read all about how to get started — it only takes 5 minutes! Seth Bindernagel’s blog post on why you should try Live Chat out is definitely worth a read too.

Thanks for considering helping us today! If you have any questions about how you can help out, don’t hesitate to contact us. Find out more on the How to contribute page on support.mozilla.com.

After some serious work by the webdev and IT teams, SUMO is finally in a good enough shape to be linked to from Firefox 3! Thanks a lot to Laura, Jeremy, Justin, Mike Morgan, Mark Smith, Nelson, and Jason for all your incredible work on this. What this means is that you are now taken to SUMO in (hopefully) your language when selecting Help from the menu.

Localizers: it would mean the world to us if you could spend a few minutes to make sure the links to your localized product help work properly. Use the link in the Help menu, and open the Options/Preferences window and click Help from there.

Chris and I wrote a document summarizing all that should be done: Updating product help for your locale. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. Don’t forget to localize the start pages if you haven’t done it already! It’s really easy and only takes five minutes.

Thanks!

Attention SUMO contributors: If you haven’t submitted a screencast for one of our top 100 knowledge base articles yet, today is the perfect day. As you might know, we have been running a contest where we reward one winner per article (up to 100 winners!) with a prize, and the best screencast overall with a grand prize. There are still plenty of chances to win, but you have to submit your screencast before 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time today!

Participating really couldn’t be easier — just pick one of the top 100 knowledge base articles and follow the instructions while recording it with e.g. Jing.

1. Pick an article from the top 100 list
2. Create a screencast for the article
3. Submit your screencast

If you’re one of the 100 winners, your screencast will be used in a Knowledge Base article read by thousands and thousands of Firefox users. Not only will you be rewarded with a prize, you will really make a difference to provide invaluable help for all those users.

Happy filming!

We still need submissions for articles, and what better way to win a limited run t-shirt than by recording a simple video? This t-shirt was considered for Firefox 3, but was set aside with a few others to be used for special events like this.

The Firefox Screencast Contest is open for just five more days, and there are plenty of chances of winning! Now is the time for you to spend ten minutes creating a couple of screencasts for a couple of Knowledge Base articles and win some prizes.

Here’s today’s list of Knowledge Base articles from the Screencast Contest we want you to focus on. These articles either have no submissions or need more to get the best screencast possible. Of course, you’re welcome to create a screencast for anyone of the top 100 articles, but if you pick one of the following articles, you definitely increase your chances of winning as the competition is currently low.

Today’s articles are:

• Backing up your information
• Error loading web sites
• Firefox is already running but is not responding
• Lost Bookmarks
• Configuring Windows Firewall
• Importing

Head over to the Firefox Screencast Contest and submit your screencast! Happy filming!

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

Over the next few days, I’ll be sending out invitations to Firefox Support knowledge base contributors to take a survey. If you receive an invite, do not mistake it for spam. There are multiple goals in the survey, which should help us improve the entire contributor experience.

If you’re registered as a contributor on support.mozilla.com, and don’t receive an invite within a week, contact us and provide your username.

This week and next week (April 16th to 25th) I’ll be leading a “trial” shift from 10am to 12pm PDT (19:00 to 21:00 CEST) to give our European community a chance to help users through Live Chat. At this time we can only provide support in English,  and of course you don’t have to be European to help out during these hours.

These hours won’t be added to the official hours just yet, as we’re trying them out, so you don’t have to worry about being overwhelmed by lots of requests.  At the same time, whenever we open we always get some users looking for help, so there should still be chats to go around.

If you’ve already checked us out but the current hours don’t work for you, please stop by.  If you’re new and have been waiting for a chance to try us out, read here to find out what you need to get started.

It’s been a really fun and hectic SUMO Day so far, but there is still time for you to join! We’ll be available in #sumo until 6 PM PTD, which means there are almost three hours left of the event. Help us creating screenshots, updating article for Firefox 3, helping users, or find something else that suits you.

We’re waiting for you!

This day is all about getting to know SUMO (support.mozilla.com) and how to use the site to help other Firefox users enjoy their favorite browser — Firefox, that is. If you’ve thought about helping out with user support, but haven’t been sure where to start, this day is for you.

• When: Today, 7 AM - 6 PM PDT (16:00 - 03:00 CEST)
• Where: Go to the SUMO Day home page, or join #sumo on irc.mozilla.org

For some time now, users have been redirected out of the queue if one of our helpers hasn’t accepted their chat after 4 minutes.  Obviously this is a very short amount of time given the number of requests we can get and the fact that we usually only have a handful of volunteers on to answer them.  We’ve wanted to raise this limit but haven’t been able to figure out how.

I’ve heard back from Jive support today, and it seems that there was a setting I was overlooking.  There are actually several places to set a timeout, but they are defaults that are inherited by new queues.  I had to dig in to the queue settings to change this timeout on an existing queue.  A very big thank you to Chase from Jive for figuring this out!

As I said this should be fixed now.  If anyone still has any problems with dropping from the queue before 10 minutes please let us know, either here or on irc.mozilla.org in #livechat.