Reasons for this?

• Even with real names, many people behave less empathetic on the internet. It’s too easy to forget that the person you are talking to is a real human.
• The people helping are mostly volunteers, who don’t feel obligated to be nice, or represent Mozilla.
• Also with volunteers, many are involved in support simply because they know the technical solution to some issues, and have no formal training in support.

Those factors tend to create a community of geeks lacking the social skills to help novice users. Most people in the community just haven’t considered this. If a fellow user is being uncivil, it’s natural to flame back.

It’s important to remember:

• Empathy: If you have a problem with your cable, and call your cable company tech support, how would you like to be treated? They would never say “PEBCAK” or “RTFM“.
• The user is having a problem with Firefox, and it’s obviously of some importance to them, because they made the effort to find the support venue, register, and post about it. If they’ve gone that extent, we should expect a level of frustration. It would be nice if most users posting in a support forum were calm and civil, but that’s not the nature of the beast.

I’m not saying the customer is always right; I’m saying don’t argue with them. Here are some tips everyone can use when giving technical support:

• Remind yourself of your purpose there. It should be to help others, not to show off your knowledge of Firefox. Don’t expect to be treated like royalty by users, just because you’re helping them. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you” does not fly with software users. If you don’t think you’re getting enough appreciation, let it be known to the forum manager, not the user.
• Packaging, packaging, packaging! Almost any criticism of the user can be phrased in a way that appears helpful rather than confrontational. If your mind says “How in the world am I supposed to help you, when you provide no details and no URL? I’m not a mind-reader“, then say “We’ll need some more info about your Firefox setup. Here are the details we need and how to provide them…” There’s a big difference between telling a user he/she should have searched the web before posting, and letting them know that they can search the web before posting.
• You can calm a user down by explaining things. Frustration comes from lack of understanding. A couple of years ago, I went to see my dentist about a pain I was having. He showed me an x-ray of my tooth, explained what the problem was and why it was happening. He then told me what he planned to do to fix the problem, warned me of any side-effects, and told me how much it would cost. I walked out of there feeling much more confident and relaxed about the situation. I also thought “So much of that applies to user support“. Instead of simply giving the user instructions on how to fix a problem, explain what you think the cause of the problem probably is, and what the solution is. Then tell them how to carry out the solution.
• If you’re not having the same problem as the user, say so. It doesn’t directly help the user, but it shows that you’re making an effort to help, which the user will appreciate. It shows that the problem may not be a bug, which will discourage other users from chiming in just to rant about the product. It encourages people to give details, which a good user support person loves like crack.
• Act as if you are talking to the user in-person.
• Don’t get hung up on protocol. This is something I see a lot of in newsgroups. If the user starts a new thread to respond to your reply in the original thread, or puts the entire question in the subject and nothing in the message body, mention it, but don’t focus on it. That takes focus away from the issue they posted about. Better yet, don’t mention it at all until after you’ve solved their problem. At that point, they will have gained some respect for what you have to say.
• If the user just wants to argue, disengage. Some users just want to rant. It’s good to offer to help and direct them where to submit feedback, but if you’ve already done that and they continue to rant, leave it alone.

Quantity vs quality is hard. With SUMO focusing on making sure every question gets answered, making those answers better quality can take time away from another user getting any answer at all. One good way to solve that is snippets that provide good detailed explanations, instructions, and links. Right now, you can use an extension called Clippings, which allows you to automatically paste canned responses you’ve saved. It works on both Firefox and Thunderbird, so you can use it on web-forums as well as mailing lists and newsgroups. You can find a list of canned responses to use on the Mozilla wiki. Soon the SUMO support forum will have canned responses built in.

What should Mozilla do when a volunteer is not being empathetic?

That’s a natural extension to the above issue. I have some scattered thoughts on that. I still need to organize them, and will probably start a thread in the SUMO community forum to discuss.

If you’ve made it this far into this blog post, thanks for reading.

I recently decided to revive the website, and at least bring it back up to date. In addition to correcting out of date content, I had learned a lot about technical writing from working on the SUMO project, and wanted to apply that to my SeaMonkey Help site. I also had the tools to make screenshots and screencasts and learned the enormous value they add to support.

As I started looking at all the things I need to do to update the site, it was clear that this was a huge task. For over 200 items, I had to:

• convert markup to HTML5 (to include screencasts)
• remove obsolete content
• test each help item to see if it still applied to the latest version of SeaMonkey
• fix the text content (and markup)

And all of that was before enhancing the content with screenshots and screencasts.

I was in the shower thinking about how to plan this massive update, when I thought “Why am I even bothering to provide text and images, when I can replace it all with screencasts?”

• Updating the markup is dead easy.
• The understandability goes way up.
• I have section indexes, and the page titles are searchable, so finding pages should not be a problem.

For some of the content, text is better, and any css that needs to be copied was added below the screencast, so there are some exceptions. But for the most part, it is a screencast-only help site.

 And…..Here it is!

I don’t know if I’m the only one with this issue, so I thought I’d share how I fixed it.

In my Bugzilla Preferences, there is an Email Preferences tab that allows me to choose what changes I get emailed about based on my relationship to the bug. In it, I turned off most options for when I am a voter of a bug. Then, for any bugs in which I only care if the bug is fixed, I vote for it instead of adding myself to the CC list.

I made that change over a week ago. So far, so good.

When you delete a message, it doesn’t really get deleted from the folder. It gets marked as deleted. Thunderbird sees that marking, and knows not to display the message. Compacting a folder will command Thunderbird to remove all messages marked as deleted from that folder.

To compact your folders, go to the File menu and select Compact Folders.
To compact an individual folder, right-click on the folder and select Compact.

If you’re having any issues, post in the Thunderbird Support forum at https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/ask

The site uses HTML (of course), CSS, SSI, and a small htaccess script to hide file extensions.

SeaMonkey 1.1.1 has been released.

Following the Gecko security update releases a few days ago, the SeaMonkey project issued new security and stability releases today for its all-in-one internet application suite. SeaMonkey 1.1.1 is now available for download, fixing several security vulnerabilities as well as a list of problems users of SeaMonkey 1.1 reported to developers.

Keeping the net secure and previewing new features

The SeaMonkey Council is pleased to announce two new releases simultaneously:
First, SeaMonkey 1.0.6 continues the successful 1.0 series of the SeaMonkey all-in-one internet suite, fixing several security vulnerabilities and various stability issues (see the release notes for more information). The SeaMonkey Council recommends that all users upgrade to this stable, well-tested version.
Second, the SeaMonkey project has been working hard on improving its software even further, adding new features such as tab previews, spell checking in the browser, an e-mail tagging system, an improved Linux startup script, better new mail notifications, an updated Chatzilla IRC client, and more. A new preview showing off those improvements, SeaMonkey 1.1 Beta, was also released today. This version is intended for developers and testers (but not yet for end users). The SeaMonkey Council encourages interested people to test the Beta and help identify the remaining bugs. Be sure to read the release notes before testing though, as they list not only the new features but also a number of known issues. Any problems that are not already known should be reported to the developers via Bugzilla so that the final SeaMonkey 1.1 release can continue the traditional high quality expected from the Mozilla suite and the SeaMonkey 1.0 series.