SUMO Blog

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Over 4 million weekly visitors the last couple of weeks. Yay, F1 keyboard shortcut!
  • New record in forum threads last week. Could be a combination of .NET searches, Windows 7 searches, and more traffic
  • What are the time ranges for trended search terms?
    • cilias to double-check with Ken
• Last week’s weekly support issues

Knowledge Base

• New articles:
  • Crash signature – RtlpCoalesceFreeBlocks or RtlAllocateHeap
  • Will Firefox work on Windows 7
• Need someone to help with Windows 7 screenshots
  • Possible change in screenshot policy, preferring Windows 7 screenshots over XP? (XP still has the majority of traffic)
    • Makes sense, especially given the upcoming Browser Ballot audit
    • cilias to announce in the forum
• How can we create a bridge for Live Chat and Forum contributors to start contributing to the KB?
  • One way is to make sure more people see the contributor forum, where the SUMO community is connected
  • Encourage people to sign up on SUMO before being approved in Live Chat — already happening (zzxc)
  • Send out e-mail to new forum contributors (cww)
  • cilias to post in Contributors forum to ask for other ideas

Forum

• New helpers: TXGuy and jscher2000

Live Chat

• Graph of issues and tags
  • Main takeaway is that there is a very long tail of support requests coming in to Live Chat, which is expected
  • The graphs helps spotting and comparing trends between weeks (for example, the Facebook spike a few weeks ago)
• New very active Live Chat contributor: fingalPC. Welcome, and thanks so much for your help so far!

Roundtable

• Mockup of the help users on forum screen

Firefox 3.6 is the next significant Firefox milestone release, and the first beta release is coming soon. We need to start thinking about what updates we need to make to the knowledge base, and plan how to deploy those updates.

The plan itself is not set yet. First, we would like to gather a list of changes from 3.5 to 3.6 that affect user support. Once we have a good idea of what has changed in Firefox, we can:

2. Assess what changes need to be made to the knowledge base.
3. Establish which changes can be done using a script that will automatically update all articles.
4. Draft an update plan.

I’ve started a wiki page on wiki.mozilla.org to gather a list of changes in Firefox 3.6. If you know of any changes not on the list that affect user support, please add them to the page with a link to relevant information (bug number or blog post).

If you have any questions, just ask in the Contributors forum thread. Thank you!

Since Live Chat started, over 1000 people have helped us in at least one chat, and over 200 have been regular helpers. We have answered almost 50,000 total chats (between 600 and 1000 each week), with 10 to 20 people answering chats weekly. As we get close to two years of offering Live Chat support, there are many great Live Chat community members that we would like to recognize. Tobias Markus (Tobbi) and Tanner are two Support community members we’d like to mention specifically for their continuing contributions throughout the project.

Tobias got started with Live Chat in January 2009, and since has become an active contributor to the Support knowledge base and the German localization community.  Earlier this month, he met up with dozens of other Mozilla project contributors at Mozcamp EU 2009 in Prague, and he has recently been working on creating add-ons for Firefox.  Tanner has been helping with the support project since starting with Live Chat in October, 2008. He has since become active in introducing new community members, in helping the Quality Assurance project by testing and investigating bugs, and in moderating our Support Forum. Tobbi and Tanner: thanks for being a great part of the Support community and the Mozilla project!

For people wanting to get more involved with Mozilla, helping with Live Chat is a great way to make a difference and connect with others. If a question isn’t documented on our Knowledge Base and the helper doesn’t know the answer, it’s easy to get advice from other people who are signed in. One of the best aspects of Live Chat is that you don’t need to be an expert to make a big difference, as it’s usually easy to find someone else who is already familiar with most any issue. All you need is 1-2 hours and a genuine willingness to help!

If you’re looking for a way to get more involved with other Mozilla volunteers, or if you enjoy helping others solve problems, we’d love to have you as part of the support community. You can join Live Chat directly, or see all the ways you can help Mozilla Support.

Over the weekend, there was quite a bit of activity regarding security issues in .NET Framework Assistant and Windows Presentation Foundation.  These are add-ons that were installed via Windows Update for a majority of Windows users. Mike Shaver did a great job of summarizing what happened and why those MS add-ons were temporary blocklisted here.

Given the number of people with these add-ons on their system who would be notified by Firefox, we anticipated that users would come to Firefox Support with questions about the blocklist.

Indeed, since October 15th, “windows presentation foundation” and “blocklist” are the top recent gaining search terms.

For this issue, we already had an article about the add-ons blocklist, and a mention of the .NET Framework Assistant in an article about uninstalling add-ons. To accommodate the increase in search traffic about the recently blocklisted items, we created 2 new articles (1 for each MS add-on), and expanded the add-ons blocklist article.

If you come across any users asking for more information about these blocklisted items and how to enable or disable them, you can direct him/her to these articles:

• Windows Presentation Foundation
• .NET Framework Assistant
• Add-ons blocklist

Sumo

• SUMO goals 2010 brainstorm (click the link for the actual outcomes of the discussion!)
• Weekly metrics
• Last week’s weekly support issues

Knowledge Base

• New approver: Tobbi!
• Gathering list of changes in Firefox 3.6 that will affect support. After we have the list complete, we can assess what articles need to be updated, and what can be scripted.
• Ideas for article on staying safe on the web [1]
• New articles:
  • Multi-touch does not work
  • Unexpected installation error -203 when installing add-ons
  • Unable to download attachments from Hotmail or Windows Live Mail
  • .NET Framework Assistant
  • Windows Presentation Foundation

Live Chat

• Chat tags Tags and issues from last week
  • “Other” issues account for almost 60% of all chats

Roundtable

• Search indexing should be working again now

Following up on my post last week about how the SUMO project developed in 2009, it’s time to repeat the circle for 2010! It’s time to start thinking about where to take the project, which areas to focus on, and ultimately which goals to define for 2010.

To help get the goal discussion started, it’s obviously helpful to know why SUMO exists. In my opinion, there are three main reasons:

1. To help people have a great Firefox (and by extension web) experience
2. To provide key user and product insights to the Mozilla community
3. To strengthen and grow Mozilla’s community

Based on this list, we can create three focus areas, or “buckets” for our 2010 goals:

• Improve the support experience for users
• Provide better/more accurate/more detailed metrics and insights for other Mozilla teams and the entire Mozilla community
• Make the SUMO experience more enjoyable for contributors

In today’s SUMO meeting, we’ll kick off the discussion by spending 15-30 minutes brainstorming ideas. You’re very welcome to call in! That said, if you don’t have time to call in, or would rather share your ideas in writing, there is an active thread in the SUMO contributor forum dedicated for this. Please feel free to post there with thoughts, ideas, or, if you’re feeling particuarly creative, screenshots, mockups or screencasts of what you have in mind.

Of course, if you don’t have a SUMO account and for some reason don’t want to create it, you are welcome to participate by commenting on this blog post too.

Here’s one of those things that make me feel good about being a part of SUMO and Mozilla.

In late 2008, the SUMO team started to collect feedback from the community about what we should focus on in order to make the platform and Firefox Support website a more exciting place to collaborate on. We also added our own ideas about how to improve the experience for both Firefox users visiting the site and contributors helping out. The result of this work is something I called the Vision for SUMO followed by the SUMO 2009 roadmap.

Since then, we’ve worked to make the vision a reality. We’ve improved the quality of our support. We’ve improved our ability to provide user insights and track user trends. We’ve managed to implement many cool and useful features (with lots of help from the amazing web development team at Mozilla) which really made it easier and more fun to contribute on SUMO as well as improved the experience on the website for users. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve had a good time.

All these amazing achievements aside, this is what makes me the most proud:

Growth of SUMO community since October 2008

In a little less than a year, we’ve managed to double the number of active locales, doubled the number of translated articles, and most importantly, more than doubled the number of active SUMO contributors!

As a side note, the survey that was sent out after MozCamp 09 in Prague showed that 30% of the attendees were involved with user support. That’s an amazingly large proportion of our European community actively involved with helping our users having a great experience on the web!

30% of Ludovic Hirlimann's photo of the European community, used under CC-BY-NC license

Even though it’s just October, I’m already blown away by the achievements by everyone in the SUMO community in 2009. And by the way, I’m glad it’s just October: it’s time to start thinking about where to take SUMO in 2010! More on that tomorrow very soon…

Running the latest version of Firefox with outdated plugins is like having a modern burglar alarm while leaving the balcony door wide open. In order to be safe on the web, your plugins must be updated too.

As an example of the real threats of using outdated plugins, consider the popular Flash plugin created by Adobe Systems. It is used to play videos on YouTube and many other sites, and has a history of serious security issues. What this means is that if you haven’t upgraded to the latest version of Flash, it doesn’t matter if you’re using the latest and most secure version of Firefox because plugins are independent pieces of programs running inside the web browser, which Mozilla doesn’t control (and didn’t create). Of course, this is true for every web browser out there, including Internet Explorer.

In other words, no matter how safe your web browser is, you’re still vulnerable to security exploits if your plugins are not up to date, because they open up security holes beyond the web browser’s control.

So how do you ensure that your plugins are up to date? Mozilla’s new Plugin Check page comes to the rescue! The page went live today on mozilla.com after a few weeks of testing and is a very important step in making the web safer. To see if you’re running any outdated and insecure plugins, just visit the Plugin Check page and update any plugins marked as out of date.

For Firefox Support and the SUMO community, this is an important milestone since 30% of the reported crashes are caused by plugins. By increasing the number of users running updated plugins, the number of reported problems on SUMO should drop significantly. Also, giving users access to a page that allows them to take control of their security is a good example of how important web safety is for Mozilla.

This Plugin Check page is just the first step in making it easier to keep your plugins safe. Future versions of Firefox will have this functionality built in, eventually making the experience as seamless as keeping Firefox itself up to date. In the meantime, we’ll make sure to link to the Plugin Check page wherever it makes sense to do so on SUMO.

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • The “AVG blocks Firefox as a trojan” is now fixed!

Knowledge Base

• EU Ballot
  • Finalize list of articles for KB audit by tomorrow?
  • Thoughts on SHOWFOR for Windows 7 based on article list
    • Is it really needed, or can we get away with just creating a “How to install Firefox on Windows 7″ article and simplifying the other articles?
  • Improve Ask a question page?

Forum

• Proposal: Implement checking for tags to predict user’s question (mockup) – Milos
  • Actually already part of the original Ask a Question redesign, but had to be pushed out because an outdated version of Sphinx. Upgrading Sphinx and fixing this will happen in Q4 2009!

Live Chat

• Tags and issues from last week
  • Add-on problems were the most common issue
  • AVG was misidentifying the Firefox installer as a trojan, should be fixed in latest AVG update
  • zzxc to try different graph designs next week to make it easier to understand

Roundtable

• Blog post about Live Chat community on Wednesday (zzxc)
• Effort to get feedback from Firefox beta users in a series of opt-in surveys. What kind of information do we need? comment here
• We have a new system that allows us to do A/B testing on a lot more stuff. Check out the current list of tests and let us know your ideas

Over the past quarter, there has been an effort with Firefox Support around working closer with everyone in the Mozilla community and acting as a bridge between the Mozilla community and the more mainstream segment of Firefox users.  We blogged earlier about some of the ways that we can provide feedback to Firefox developers, QA and other members of the Mozilla community. This blog post will focus on some concrete examples of how this close relationship worked in the wake of Firefox 3.5.

Norton toolbar disabled in Firefox 3.5

Symantec did not have the Norton toolbar updated in advance of the Firefox 3.5 push so many users who updated found themselves without a key part of their browser.  This understandably upset many Firefox users who interpreted the “Norton toolbar is disabled” message as that they were no longer safe online.

In this instance, a close collaboration with the QA, Add-ons and Firefox team alerted us that this may be a big deal so we got a knowledge base article written right away in advance of the push.  Furthermore, with a downloadable patch from Norton, we were able to give these Firefox users a workaround and help make sure that their Firefox 3.5 upgrade went as smoothly as possible.

Lost bookmarks when upgrading

When the upgrade to 3.5 offer was popped up to all 3.0 users, we suddenly noticed a significant increase in the number of users reporting that some or all of their bookmarks were missing.  In addition to helping users restore their bookmarks and updating KB articles, we worked closely with the Firefox team to figure out the cause.  After collecting files from willing users and doing some detective work in conjunction with affected users, we managed to figure out that these users were actually getting reverted to bookmarks from Firefox 2.  This led to a quick patch that rolled out in the next update of Firefox.

What’s really great is how quickly we went from discovering a problem through our forums and live chat into putting out a patch that potentially helped millions of Firefox users who’ve updated since.  This loop of getting information from users and turning that into fixes for users is what makes collaboration with the greater Mozilla community so rewarding and why it’s so important.

Problems caused by extensions, plugins and third party software

Being able to work with users experiencing a problem, SUMO also plays a role in identifying extensions, plugins and third party programs that can issues for users.  For example, when a number of users complained about not being able to use the right mouse button in Firefox 3.5, we narrowed down that Yahoo Toolbar versions older than 2.0 were the cause.  Just this week, SUMO was one of the first places that users reported that AVG was marking Firefox as a trojan.  Very quickly, we got a KB article up and within 24 hours, Tomcat in Mozilla’s QA group was able to work with AVG and get updated virus definitions pushed.

Crashes

In addition to the above, we’ve been working on incorporating information about top crashes into the knowledge base and helping connect the developers working on crashes with users experiencing them.  As part of that we had a recent sprint to write KB articles for the 30 top crashes and are constantly monitoring new topcrashes.  In the upcoming quarter, we hope to really ramp up this effort and make it even faster to get crashed diagnosed or reproduced so they can be fixed.

In general, working closely with support, not only benefits the 4 million SUMO visitors a week, it can also make the Firefox experience better for the 300 million Firefox users out there.

What you can do to help

As a member of the Mozilla community, there are a couple things that you can do to help us work better together.

1. Work on, triage or help reproduce common-issue+ bugs. We’re using the common-issue+ keyword to mark issues that we see a lot on support.  Getting activity on those bugs helps complete the loop from user via SUMO back to improving the experience for users.
2. Mark commonly-duped bugs with the common-issue? keyword. We may not spot every issue or in some cases, the symptoms of a bug are generic and we may not realize they’re distinct from another bug.  Marking a bug with the common-issue? keyword lets us know to pay specific attention to an issue and see if it’s actually happening to users who show up on SUMO.
3. Help with user support.  Working with users relies on having community members answer questions on our support forums and live chat service.  It’s really easy to get started and the more user questions we answer, the more information we can feed back to the larger Mozilla community.

The full slides for a brownbag Cheng hosted on this topic can be found here.  If you have more ideas for how SUMO can work better with you or other feedback, please let us know in the comments below, in the #sumo IRC channel or via email.