Firefox Support Blog

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.

Some people may have noticed that the Contributor Tools box on support.mozilla.com is missing. That’s actually because of a new preference in the Account Settings panel, in which you can set whether or not you are a contributor. If you haven’t already seen it, please:

1. Log in to support.mozilla.com.
2. In the top right corner, click on “My Account“.
3. In the Preferences section, select the “Contributors” group.
4. Click on “Change preferences”.

We’ve now gathered enough feedback from the community to make a decision about the SUMO Day: we’ll host the event on Friday, April 11th. Thanks for the feedback everyone and stay tuned for more info about this soon…

Firefox 2.0.0.13 is coming out soon; and one common issue that spikes with every update is firewalls blocking Firefox from accessing the internet. We have a few tutorials on the Firefox Support web site, but there are many more firewalls we don’t have tutorials for. This is a great opportunity for us to compile a more complete list of firewall tutorials.

Please help us, by creating tutorials on how to configure each firewall to work with Firefox. To get started, read the creating articles page. Firewalls we are looking for tutorials on:

• [Bug 424783] KB article: Configuring McAfee firewall
• [Bug 424784] KB article: Configuring Trend Micro Internet Security
• [Bug 424786] KB article: Configuring Panda Firewall
• [Bug 424787] KB article: Configuring Comodo Firewall
• [Bug 424789] KB article: Configuring BitDefender Internet Security
• [Bug 424790] KB article: Configuring Defender Pro
• [Bug 424791] KB article: Configuring Webroot Desktop Firewall
• [Bug 424792] KB article: Configuring AVG Internet Security
• [Bug 424796] KB article: Configuring Mac firewall

If you want to create a tutorial for another firewall, remember to file a request (or reviewers won’t know to review the article for approval).

You can view the other firewall tutorials for an idea of how to approach it. And please include screenshots!

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!

On the Firefox Support knowledge base, we make use of tikiwiki feature called “Dynamic Content.” This allows us to create blocks of content that can be inserted in any page. Each content block is language specific, and can have the same name as a content block in another language.  This helps us in updating common instructions used, and in the translation process.

Firefox Support locale leaders, and senior editors (approvers) should read this tutorial I’ve created, which explains how to create and use dynamic content on the Firefox Support knowledge base.

Firefox 3 is in beta, and we will eventually be updating articles in the Firefox Support knowledge base with Firefox 3 information. As we prepare the in-product pages for Firefox 3, we’ve also been keeping track of which current knowledge base articles will need updating.

I’ve created a page on wiki.mozilla.org to keep track. If you see knowledge base articles that will need editing for Firefox 3 changes, please add them to the linked page.