We are currently working hard to build a kick-ass Firefox support site at support.mozilla.com, also known as SUMO. However, the site is only usable for English speaking people today, representing about 50% of the Firefox user base. While providing support for 50% of our users is a good start, we plan on extending the scope of SUMO in the future, and I thought it would be a good idea to blog about these plans.
Here is the basic idea for the SUMO l10n roll-out:
- First, focus on en-US content and make SUMO the number one support channel for the majority of our English speaking users. This includes the Knowledge Base, the Forums, and the Live Chat (milestones 0.1 – 0.4 in the SUMO Roadmap). The plan is to have everything up and running by the end of this year.
- When milestone 0.5 (Make Knowledge Base l10n Not Suck) is finished sometime in January next year, we will start approaching locales having non-existent or very small support communities to fill out the gaps where there is limited or no Firefox support today.
- Create localized start pages of SUMO for the majority of the locales.
- For the big communities with already existing healthy support communities, acknowledge them by linking to their external websites from the localized SUMO start pages.
- As localized content start to appear for the smaller communities, start approaching the larger communities and make them aware of the progress. Hopefully, it will be easier to do this when we have a working l10n solution and a vibrant international community around the project.
- On a case-by-case basis, gradually remove links to third-party localized support sites as the content on SUMO increases.
- Of course, as long as the third-party content is better than what we have on SUMO, we should link to it.
Bob Chao
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