kb articles -- suggestions on missiing content, articles that need tuning for end users, and other upgrades.
Chris Hofmann
I extracted some lists of kb articles that are currently published at
mozillazine and posted them here
http://people.mozilla.com/~chofmann/support/
http://people.mozilla.com/~chofmann/support/mozillazine-kb-articles.html
has expanded lists of a few of the top indexes to surface articles that
are linked across several categories and get an idea of how the top
level categorization is arranged
http://people.mozilla.com/~chofmann/support/test.html
has a rough listing of the 367 uniq kb pages that relate in someway to
firefox.
Any thoughts on categories/tags that would would assist in navigation
and search?
Any thoughts on an categories of articles that are missing?
--one thing I see periodically is advice for users that believe they
might be infected by spyware with some steps they can take to diagnose
and fix their system. dveditz/jesse have some good advices on this and
we ought to turn their "canned response" into a kb article.
--any other ideas like this? we should have some search data soon, that
will also be useful in identifying missing categories, articles, and
article renaming improvements that might fill some holes.
As discussed at a previous meeting, a lot of the content, and article
names are more tuned to "support helpers" v. "end users"
Any thoughts on which articles and categories should be tunned for
improving comprehension by novice users?
Lets kick off a bit of general discussion on this, and then if it looks
fruitful, we could start filing specific bugs and attacking some
improvements in these areas.
chris h.
Jason Barnabe (np)
>Any thoughts on categories/tags that would would assist in navigation
> and search?
People will often pick the first thing that may apply to them. If
Firefox crashes for a user at startup, they may look into the
"Startup" category rather than the "Stability" category even though
the second fits better.
You also have to be careful not too make categories too broad. A "User
interface problems" category could conceivably (to a user) apply to a
number of issues that we don't expect, e.g. "An error is displayed on
my user interface" "My user interface doesn't come up"
> Any thoughts on which articles and categories should be tunned for
> improving comprehension by novice users?
A lot of the articles seem to list every possible way of doing
something for every possible set up. For example, http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder
is an article that has info for all OSes, all apps. Specifically, for
a Windows XP user:
"(Navigate to the) default profile locations are listed below"
"Windows 2000 and XP: Choose "Start → Run → Type in %APPDATA% → click
OK""
"You can also specify which folder to open; for example, entering
%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox in the Windows XP Run box will open
"Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox"."
"You can also search for specific files in your profile folder or
other hidden locations using Windows Search."
"From the Mozilla application's menu bar, choose "Tools -> Error
Console" or "Tools -> JavaScript Console" (or "Tools -> Web
Development -> JavaScript Console"). Copy the following code. It is
one very long line ending in path—make sure that you get all of it:"
"You could also use MR Techs Local Install extension"
It'd be useful if we could make certain assumptions about users, such
as they're using a regular build with a profile in the default place.
We could still cater to other users, but we could put info for them in
separate sections or something.
We could also set up a guideline to keep the number of possible
solutions down to keep the articles simpler, such as "Don't list every
possible way to do something, list the easiest and most likely to
work".