Firefox Support Blog

Everyone should head on over to the Support Firefox Day 3 homepage and get in on the action!

Support Firefox Day 3 is focusing on acquainting users with the awesome changes in Firefox 3 and even includes some tips for power users.  Sessions are LIVE and interactive.  Make sure you click “Turn me on” to enable the live video feed, and sign in to #sfd on irc.mozilla.org if you have a question (an client is available in the page if you don’t have your own.)

Schedule (all times GMT -7):

10:30 am PDT - Overview of Firefox 3’s new features with Director of Firefox Development Mike Connor

11:30 am PDT - How to use the Site Identification button and other new security features with Human Shield Johnathan Nightingale

12:30 pm PDT - Bookmarks, History, the Awesomebar and you! with Lead Places Developer Dietrich Ayala

1:15 pm PDT - Tricks for powerusers with Community Program Manager Seth Bindernagel

2:00 pm PDT - All about Firefox 3’s new web-based help with Firefox Support Manager David Tenser, hosted by Keeper of the Knowledge Base Chris Ilias

Followed by an open session:

Helping users with the Firefox Support community. We’ll show you how to get started helping users with problems and troubleshooting problems. Anyone can get started, you don’t have to be an expert!

See you there!

At the end of Sunday, June 15, we will close the Firefox Screencast Contest, so there are only a few days left for you to submit your screencast.

Want to win? Starting today, we will feature a number of daily Knowledge Base articles from the Screencast Contest that we want you to focus on. These articles either have no submissions or need more to get the best screencast possible. If you pick one of these articles, you definitely increase your chances of winning some prizes as the competition is currently low.

Today’s articles are:

• Configuring AVG Internet Security
• ActiveX (suggested section: Uninstalling the ActiveX plugin on Windows)
• Installing Firefox on Windows
• Basic Troubleshooting
• Firefox cache file was infected with a virus
• Unable to download or save files

I picked one of the articles above, Installing Firefox on Windows, and created a quick screencast for it using Jing. (If you’re new to Jing and screencasts, watch this easy tutorial from Jing’s website)

This is what the result looks like, after a couple of minutes recording the screencast: Watch how to install Firefox on Window

Think you can do better than that? We think so too! For one, it would be better if it included the part of the instructions covering downloading the installation file and save it to your desktop. Are you up for the challenge? The head over to the Firefox Screencast Contest and submit your screencast!

The weekend hasn’t started yet! Don’t miss the two remaining chat sessions on Support Firefox Day:

• 4:00 - 4:30 PM PDT: Chat with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corporation. John will be available to answer your questions about Mozilla, including how it was started, where it’s going, and any other things you can think of.
• 4:30 - 5:00: Chat with Asa Dotzler, Spokesmodel and Storyteller. Asa has been a part of Mozilla since the very early days and is the perfect person to ask your questions — any questions — about… anything!

Head over to the Support Firefox Day Events page and follow the instructions there for how to ask questions to John and Asa.

…or “Share what you know, learn what you don’t.”

Tomorrow will be a special day for Mozilla as we’ll be hosting the very first Support Firefox Day. You’ll get a chance to learn more about Mozilla, Firefox 3, and Firefox Support (SUMO) — and have your voice heard. We promise you you’ll learn something new! We also hope you’ll be able to share that with others.

When?

• Friday May 23, starting 8 AM PDT

Where?

• Support Firefox Day start page

Here is the action-packed schedule:

• 8:00 AM PDT - 10:00: Support session #1
• 10:00 – 10:45: Workshop: Supporting Firefox 3 users with Live Chat. In this workshop, you’ll learn all you need to know about the cool user-to-user support solution on SUMO to start helping others. Host: Lucy Connor
• 11:00 - 11:30: Chat with Mike Connor, Developer Lead of Firefox 3. Mike will be taking your questions about the upcoming release of Firefox 3 and all its new features, including the all-new product help (yes, SUMO!)
• 11:30 - 12:30: Support Session #2
• 12:30 - 1:15: Workshop: Learn all about the new bookmark system in Firefox 3 (tags, smart location bar, keywords) to better help others. Host: Dietrich Ayala
• 1:30 – 2:00: Chat with Mike Beltzner, Phenomenologist & Usability Design Expert. This is your chance to get your questions about the Mozilla way of designing software answered straight from the source. You’ll learn, among other things, how user feedback and support continuously loops back into product.
• 2:00 - 3:00: Support Session #3
• 3:00 - 3:45: Workshop: Learn how to troubleshoot Firefox 3 like a pro. You’ll find out more about how Firefox works, and at the same time you’ll become an expert of user-to-user troubleshooting. Host: Matthew Middleton
• 4:00 - 4:30: Chat with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corporation. John will be available to answer your questions about Mozilla, including how it was started, where it’s going, and any other things you can think of.
• 4:30 - 5:00: Chat with Asa Dotzler, Spokesmodel and Storyteller. Asa has been a part of Mozilla since the very early days and is the perfect person to ask your questions — any questions — about… anything!

The big highlight of the day will be the best new Firefox 3 feature of all: Firefox’s new user-based support system. All throughout the day, we’ll be showcasing the various aspects to the support system: from the collaboratively written knowledge base to the forums and chat-based support, and we’re inviting you to take part. We’ll be around all day in #sumo to answer questions and help you get started helping your fellow users and Firefox enthusiasts.

Please let us know if you’re coming so we can better plan the events. See you tomorrow!

A couple of weeks ago, Chris sent out a personal invitation to all SUMO knowledge base contributors to take a survey about their experiences with the website. It is our hope that we’ll get a better understanding of how our current Knowledge Base contributors use our system, and where we need better documentation.

The survey is still open, so if you’ve received an e-mail but haven’t yet taken the survey, please take it! If you haven’t received an e-mail but feel you should, please comment here.

Get ready to participate in the Firefox Screencasts contest! This is your chance to use your talents and passion for Firefox to create screencast support videos for the Firefox Support (SUMO) knowledge base.

We have prepared a list of the top 100 most popular support articles from the SUMO knowledge base and ask YOU to create screencasts for one, two, three, or all of them!  You can enter as many screencasts as you like.  With 100 different articles, anyone can choose whatever article for which they would like to create a screencast.

Mozilla will not be hosting the videos during this contest, so please use a third-party application like Jing to record your screencast and send us the link so we can view it. Ever used Jing?  Here’s a great online demo.  Click “Video Tour” on the front page to see how to use it…it couldn’t be easier!  Just download and begin recording!

All entries will be judged by a team who will look at the submissions and pick the best one for each of the 100 articles. That’s 100 winners!!

What are you waiting for? Go to the Firefox Screencasts contest and start sharing your knowledge!

A huge thanks goes out to Seth, Tara, and Alix for all their help in the preparations of this contest. Also thanks to the awesome SUMO team for the initial planning sessions in Toronto. Last but certainly not least, to everyone in the community who helped writing the top 100 support articles: THANK YOU!! This would not have been possible without your amazing contributions.

Attendees: djst, cilias, lucy, nkoth, zzxc

Sumo

• Weekly metrics [1]
  • Traffic to site steadily increasing — more than doubled the last couple of weeks!
• 0.5 milestone status (localization) [2]
  • Done, pending one low-priority bug [3] that we will slip
• 0.6 milestone status (in-product help) [4]
  • In-product mode will land this Friday [5]
  • Start page has been cleaned up [6], but we need to move top 10 list out to a content id block to make sure we can change it without touching the localized pages. Also, we need to decide on the New to Firefox box. Suggestion: just a stylish, large box with the text “New to Firefox? Click here!” Clicking on it would take you to the in-product landing page [7]

Knowledge Base

• Week before last: 0 article requests, 3 new articles [8]. Last week: 0 article requests, 4 new articles[9].
• New en-US contributor: David Naylor (naylor83), who has been fixing use of language, to make English articles more understandable. Also, he has translated some articles to Swedish. Welcome, and thanks, David!
• Big thanks to Alice Wyman, who improved the Importing from Netscape article.
• SHOWFOR
  • Per djst’s request, we’re not going to bother making sure SHOWFOR is applied to all article that need it. Instead, we’re going to make sure the top 50 articles are taken care of, and hope the community takes care of the rest.
    • Just to clarify, I don’t think it’s a high enough priority for us to do the update on all articles. The important thing is that we make the technology easy for other contributors to use and understand, and update the most read articles to show how we intend for the technology to be used. — djst
  • The above necessitates that we create new dynamic content, that is basically the current dynamic content, but with SHOWFOR. This way, articles without SHOWFOR won’t be broken.
• Content ID
  • We’re currently reusing blocks of text in articles that are used in more than one article, e.g. instructions on how to access the Options/Preferences window. To make this easier to use, we currently use something called content ids, which is like a variable we insert in a wiki document, e.g. {content id=4}, which then translates to the actual text, e.g. “In the menu, click Tools and then click Options…”
  • We need to switch from using e.g. {content id=4} to use {content label=options} instead.
    • Unlike content ids, content labels are localizable
    • Easier to remember a word than a number
    • Chris to write documentation for contributors and localizers on how to use this
• Need to switch from using content ids to use content label

Forums

• Jason couldn’t make it to this meeting.

Live Chat

• Presented list of our biggest issues with the live chat software to Jive
  • Initial response from Jive that it would be too time consuming for them to work out an arrangement where we can hack on it ourselves. They will try to work on some of the stuff on the list while considering other ways we could collaborate with them instead
• Need to focus on recruiting — excellent doc written by Cww after brainstorming with other community members.
  • Definitely some very good points on things we can do to improve our community energy
  • Nelson to ask Mark Laporte of TikiWiki to read the document and see if there’s anything about the IssueTracker feature that can be used here

This week the SUMO team has been working together in the Mozilla Toronto office. Also, Nelson Ko from the TikiWiki community joined us for a couple of days. It has been a great experience to work more closely as a team. During these intense days, we’ve not only gotten to know each other more, but also:

• planned a future Video/Screencast contest, which will be a great opportunity to make support.mozilla.com better known and improve its content,
• decided on what user feedback/statistics we want to collect for the knowledge base,
• decided on how to categorize our content and how we want to present that to the users,
• fixed a number of important bugs for the (still not completed) 0.1 milestone,
• generally brainstormed and discussed various ideas and issues.

A big thanks to Nelson who prolonged his stay in Toronto to meet up with us!

Because this week has been all about working together as a team “in real life,” and because our flights would conflict with it, today’s weekly SUMO meeting will be cancelled. Regular meetings will resume again on November 8th.