Forum thread linking stats
Jason Barnabe (np)
will go through a bunch of forum threads and find what people are
linking to. Hopefully this will serve to answer a few questions:
-How much are we using external documents?
-What KB articles are we suggesting people read?
-What articles are people likely not finding?
-How often are we directing people somewhere else for help (e.g.
Thunderbird or Web Development threads)?
Here's the report http://userstyles.org/sumolinkstats.html . The
number of occurrences (sorted by most common), then the URL, then
links to the threads where they were used. This is based on 500
threads, from about Wednesday (8 days ago) to Sunday. There were 862
links posted.
Some highlights:
50 threads referenced the Safe Mode article, 25 referenced the
Troubleshooting add-ons article, and 34 referenced the Basic
Troubleshooting article which features it. It isn't very easy to
search and reach any of these articles. Maybe we should consider
linking to and explaining Safe Mode somewhere more prominent, for
example a "Before you ask a question..." page? Trying Safe Mode is
fairly easy and isn't destructive. It might be worthwhile to dig
deeper into these threads and see if it helped the user.
35 threads (7%) linked to a Thunderbird support page. Still need to
figure out how to catch these people's attention. In the mean time,
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416591 would be helpful.
Most of the most common non-KB links are for anti-virus and anti-
spyware products. The most common things we would want to consider
writing about:
-http://kb.mozillazine.org/
Issues_related_to_plugins#Identifying_installed_plugins (10)
-http://kb.mozillazine.org/Error_loading_websites (9) (this has more
solutions that our pages)
Jason Barnabe (np)
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Ask+a+question to "Before you
ask..." and including links to Safe Mode and a direction for
Thunderbird help?
bba...@gmail.com
wrote:
> What does everything think of renaming the first section athttp://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Ask+a+questionto "Before you
> ask..." and including links to Safe Mode and a direction for
> Thunderbird help?
A capital idea. Maybe also include, ((Basic troubleshooting)), which
includes Safe Mode directions, and __before__ Firefox 2.0.0.13 comes
out, include ((Unable to connect after upgrading Firefox)).
Majken Connor
> _______________________________________________
>
Yes, I would include Basic troubleshooting but not Safe Mode. Basic
troubleshooting *should* include the steps the user needs to know to use
safe mode as a diagnostic, where the safe mode article wouldn't be as
detailed. If it doesn't, we should probably improve it.
I think we should also link to this article from the main page. It explains
to people how to use the site to find an answer, and I think that will
probably help us quite a lot. I have some other thoughts on the article
itself, but I'll start a new post when I have them in order.
Jason Barnabe (np)
This message will show to everyone who couldn't find their problem in
the KB. I don't want everyone to go through the 50 or so steps in
Basic troubleshooting. These steps are destructive and take a long
time to do. On the other hand, trying Safe Mode isn't destructive and
is fairly quick. It even has better "solve" and "understand" poll
results.[1][2]
The Safe Mode article does need to include information on what to do
if the problem goes away in Safe Mode, though.
[1] http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-poll_results.php?pollId=187
[2] http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-poll_results.php?pollId=148
Majken Connor
If that's the case, I think the article is flawed, or meets different
criteria from "basic troubleshooting." Basic troubleshooting should walk a
user through some *basic* diagnostics, like safe mode, a new profile, a
clean reinstall, and then pass the user off to another article on what sorts
of things to try next if x thing worked for them. Maybe some other things
in there, like checking the firewall/AV software.
David Tenser
You have a point here. We need an article that really is about _basic_
troubleshooting, which guides the user to stuff like starting in safe
mode, creating a new profile, etc, all linking to the individual articles.
Maybe Basic Troubleshooting should be renamed to General Troubleshooting?
Anyway, I've made some changes to the staging copy of the Ask a question
article, but didn't know how to include Safe mode/troubleshooting. It
should be a bullet between search and Thunderbird in my opinion.
David Tenser
>
> You have a point here. We need an article that really is about _basic_
> troubleshooting, which guides the user to stuff like starting in safe
> mode, creating a new profile, etc, all linking to the individual articles.
>
> Maybe Basic Troubleshooting should be renamed to General Troubleshooting?
>
> Anyway, I've made some changes to the staging copy of the Ask a question
> article, but didn't know how to include Safe mode/troubleshooting. It
> should be a bullet between search and Thunderbird in my opinion.
Oops, just realized there's no staging copy for administration articles.
Removed the placeholder bullet.
David Tenser
> Based on a few requests for this data, I wrote up an extension that
> will go through a bunch of forum threads and find what people are
> linking to. Hopefully this will serve to answer a few questions:
>
> -How much are we using external documents?
> -What KB articles are we suggesting people read?
> -What articles are people likely not finding?
> -How often are we directing people somewhere else for help (e.g.
> Thunderbird or Web Development threads)?
This is absolutely great stuff Jason. I love how you do these things
without anyone asking you to do it. :)
Is the extension downloadable somewhere? It would be cool if this could
be setup to run automatically every week or so.
>
> Here's the report http://userstyles.org/sumolinkstats.html . The
> number of occurrences (sorted by most common), then the URL, then
> links to the threads where they were used. This is based on 500
> threads, from about Wednesday (8 days ago) to Sunday. There were 862
> links posted.
>
> Some highlights:
>
> 50 threads referenced the Safe Mode article, 25 referenced the
> Troubleshooting add-ons article, and 34 referenced the Basic
> Troubleshooting article which features it. It isn't very easy to
> search and reach any of these articles. Maybe we should consider
> linking to and explaining Safe Mode somewhere more prominent, for
> example a "Before you ask a question..." page? Trying Safe Mode is
> fairly easy and isn't destructive. It might be worthwhile to dig
> deeper into these threads and see if it helped the user.
>
We should also consider the fact that people who help might resort to
safe mode more out of convenience than because that's really the
solution to a user's problem. I agree that it would be interesting to
take a closer look at these threads.
> 35 threads (7%) linked to a Thunderbird support page. Still need to
> figure out how to catch these people's attention. In the mean time,
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416591 would be helpful.
>
I still think this needs to be done at an earlier stage, i.e. the start
page. Should have some cycles to get some outcome of those mockups I
made before.
Jason Barnabe (np)
> Is the extension downloadable somewhere? It would be cool if this could
> be setup to run automatically every week or so.
http://userstyles.org/apps/sumoscraper.xpi
To use, you pull up a forum thread list for what you want to report
on, then Tools -> Sumo Scraper, then don't use Firefox for about an
hour :)
David Tenser
> Jason Barnabe (np) wrote:
>> 50 threads referenced the Safe Mode article, 25 referenced the
>> Troubleshooting add-ons article, and 34 referenced the Basic
>> Troubleshooting article which features it. It isn't very easy to
>> search and reach any of these articles. Maybe we should consider
>> linking to and explaining Safe Mode somewhere more prominent, for
>> example a "Before you ask a question..." page? Trying Safe Mode is
>> fairly easy and isn't destructive. It might be worthwhile to dig
>> deeper into these threads and see if it helped the user.
>>
>
> We should also consider the fact that people who help might resort to
> safe mode more out of convenience than because that's really the
> solution to a user's problem. I agree that it would be interesting to
> take a closer look at these threads.
>
After taking a look on a handful of those Safe Mode references, it looks
more like this is a standard response and it's not uncommon that the
user doesn't respond back, or that safe mode didn't solve the problem.
That said, if you still want to try adding it to the Ask+a+question
article, go ahead. It probably won't hurt having it there anyway, other
than the risk of having too much text, which reduces the likeliness of
someone reading it all.