Hey everybody,
In today’s edition of our Contributor Spotlight, I’m thrilled to introduce you to Noah Y, a longtime contributor to our community forums. Noah’s excellence lies in his eagle-eyed investigation, most recently demonstrated when he identified that NordVPN’s web protection feature was causing Firefox auto-updates to fail. Thanks to his thorough investigation, the issue was escalated, and the SUMO content team was able to create a troubleshooting article to address the issue. In the end, NordVPN was able to resolve the problem after one of our engineers filed a support ticket with their team.
… So the way I decide if it’s worth escalating is if it affects any major/popular service or website. Because then I know thousands & possibly millions of Firefox users could be hitting the same bug quietly becoming very angry or frustrated each time they run into the problem.
Q: Please tell us about yourself
I love troubleshooting tough problems. And I love working with tech. Computers, TVs, you name it. I would take apart any electronics just on a small hope I could fix them or at least clean out the tons of dust hiding in them. I’m always intrigued by cars, tech & software. Despite this big interest, I never pursued an engineering or computer science degree. Which leaves me wishing I knew how to code. But if I did, it might have become too much of an obsession since I would want to fix everything that annoys me in my favorite software. So I’m happy I didn’t go down that path.
Q: I believe you’ve been involved with Mozilla since SUMO started. Can you tell us more about how you started contributing and what motivates you to keep going until now?
That’s right. I did start way back in 2004 by testing Firefox Nightly builds on a very cool forum community called MozillaZine Forums. Everyone helped report bugs & issues that needed to be fixed. I was good at that. Seeing those bugs get fixed was very satisfying & motivating.
But I never provided true support on those forums, I just helped test & confirm other people’s bugs/issues. The community there was very engaging & still is to this day over 20 yrs later.
I think how I got started contributing to SUMO in 2008 when it first launched, was by just answering a few questions by chance & seeing what would happen. I think I also felt bad at the time there were so many questions being asked with only a few helpers. It looked overwhelming. I mostly remember a ton of questions about Firefox crashes & homepage/search engine hijacking by malware or bad add-ons.
Q: Can you describe your workflow when working on the forum?
I try to jump around in the forums looking for missed genuine questions where the user looks really troubled but also gives a sense that they will reply. Anyone who cares enough to reply back to us once we respond is always someone I’m very interested in helping. Depending on their skills, they can also report back to us what setting, add-on or 3rd party software broke Firefox for them. So that can help us solve many more questions about the same issue.
Q: Can you share your tips and tricks for handling a difficult user on the forum? What’s your advice for other community members to avoid being overwhelmed with so many things to do?
I would say try to relate to the angry user’s frustration & let them know you understand how bad/annoying of a situation this is. I usually make it a point to let them know of past & recent issues where a website, add-on, or 3rd party software broke Firefox & that it’s not always Firefox’s fault when something breaks. There is a perception out there that every annoying issue is caused by Firefox itself or a Firefox update. This doesn’t calm down every angry user but for the reasonable users, they now understand that the blame is either shared or coming from the other side entirely.
For overwhelmed forum helpers, my advice is to reduce how many questions you respond to. I’m always surprised by how many new questions are posted daily & how I realize that not all of them are going to get solved. With that understanding, I have made my peace with only helping as many people as I can without feeling like I’m going to burnout.
Q: You have a knack in noticing a trending topic on the forum. Do you have a specific way to keep track of issues and how can you tell if an issue is worth escalating?
Thank you! I wasn’t sure if anyone else noticed that. It’s a blessing & a curse. Because once I discover a trending topic like that, I keep collecting as much info as possible & keep drilling into the details until I unlock a clue. And I won’t stop until we solve it or it’s ruled so hopeless that no one can fix it. It’s honestly like detective work.
I try to keep notes & a list of all the questions encountering the trending issue in a basic text document. Pretty old school. I may need a cooler tool to help organize & visualize this data. :) And as I keep tracking the issue & noticing more & more people appearing with the same issue, it becomes personal for me.
Because I used to be that user, suffering from some insane problem that was driving me crazy and it disrupted my work or enjoyment of the internet and absolutely nothing would solve it. When a problem becomes that severe, I realized that no one’s going to do anything about it until you start making a lot of noise & sounding the alarm bells & contacting the right people in power to help confirm, prioritize and get as many staff needed to get it fixed. Which by the way, is very awesome. As you can not easily escalate issues like this in other companies unless you are a staff member. Even then, the issue can still fall through the cracks unless you reach exactly the right person.
So the way I decide if it’s worth escalating is if it affects any major/popular service or website. Because then I know thousands & possibly millions of Firefox users could be hitting the same bug quietly becoming very angry or frustrated each time they run into the problem. Eventually they’ll become fatigued & come to the SUMO forums to vent about it or plead their desperation for getting it fixed as its ruining their lives in a lot of important areas (Can’t login to bank site, can’t watch movie/tv shows, can’t pay bills, can’t login to webmail, can’t access Medicare/Social security site, etc.). I try to proactively hunt these issues down before they become major trends. :)
Q: Given your experience, can you mention one or two things that you would consider helpful for SUMO contributors to know, based on your experience in the community forums?
That the browser is always changing & websites aren’t making sure they work in Firefox anymore. So it’s going to become more noticeable in the questions they see that certain websites are going to break more often & add-ons are going to break websites as well.
My advice would be to treat all antivirus software & all add-ons as the source of a weird issue the user is seeing. 95%+ of all problems dealing with websites not working or having a weird glitch are caused by add-ons, antivirus add-ons or the antivirus software itself intercepting all the internet traffic & blocking the wrong things causing the website to fail in Firefox.
Q: What excites you the most about Firefox development these days?
How there seems to be a refocused & dedicated effort to fix things that users are annoyed with & to build features they actually want.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you’re facing as a SUMO contributor at the moment? What would you like to see from us in the future?
SUMO is a great community and I think we just need a few more tools to reduce repetitive tasks. One idea is to be able to save personal canned responses for each forum helper so they don’t have to copy & paste them from their personal notes. Another could be to help us view a more cleanly formatted list of a user’s add-on in the System Details area. So we can take a look quickly without parsing a very large amount of JSON to find that information.
The biggest challenge I feel like is not knowing if a user had their problem resolved. Since the way people interact with forums has changed thanks to social media, they don’t really have the time to come back & post a reply. So sometimes they just give a thumbs up to our post. Which makes me wonder, does that mean my answer solved their problem? I think the thumbs up is the new way of saying your answer solved their issue. So maybe surfacing that information in a easy to see place will help me know my impact on resolving problems.
Jscher did something clever about that on his “My Questions” SUMO Contributor tool that shows a heart emoji/❤️at the top of your post if any user liked/your post.
Q: Can you tell us a story about the most rewarding moment and impactful contribution you’ve made in SUMO?
This is a tough but good question. It’s kinda hard to remember since I can’t search my answers past a certain point. But there have been a few big battles where I’ve totally forgot that I helped with. Thankfully Bugzilla has a lot of the big ones I helped solve.
One big moment was helping identify the cause of Firefox autoupdates failing for many users & they kept getting error popups about the failed updates. I could see this was going to get worse fast so I filed a bug and included as much of my findings as I could. And a Firefox dev (the awesome Nick Alexander) confirmed my findings & escalated the bug to NordVPN. It took a while (3 weeks) but NordVPN finally fixed it.
I think the most impactful contribution was giving feedback & filing bugs about site enhancements, moderation tools and site usability to SUMO over the years to make it easier & more productive for users, contributors and moderators to use the site. Special shout out to the team who originally built SUMO & helped build all our ideas into reality: Kadir Topal, Ricky Rosario, Mike Cooper, Will Kahn-Greene and Rehan Dalal. I really couldn’t have gotten anything done without this amazing team.
Q: You’ve had a few chances to meet with SUMO staff and other contributors in the past. Can you tell us more about the most productive in-person event or meeting you’ve had? What value did you get from these events?
These in-person events have been amazing. Maybe I can even say life changing because I was able to meet genuinely good people that I was able to call friends and some best friends. From what I’ve seen, Mozilla has the tendency to attract very smart people but also ones who help develop you into a better person through all the interactions you have with them.
Q: What advice would you give to someone new who wants to contribute to SUMO?
Take your time contributing. You don’t have to rush out a specific number of answers or KB article edits a day. You don’t even have to volunteer to help every day of the week. Work at your own pace. Either super slow, regular slow or just average speed. The Knowledge Base where all our support articles live will always be there. So you don’t have to rush to 100% completion to translate them to your locale. And on the forum side, the amount of questions that come to the SUMO platform are endless. Worse than that, not everyone you provide an answer to will respond back. So you may have wasted a lot of time customizing & curating a really good answer for someone, just to have them never respond at all or just put a simple thumbs down vote on your post. That’s happened to me quite a few times & I didn’t love it. So you could use my motto: Quality over quantity. A few quality posts here & there over posting 50 quick answers to which no one might reply.
That strategy/mantra will help you from burning out quickly.
And to counteract that missing feeling of engagement, I cherry pick forum questions that I think have a higher chance of reply based on how the person has stated their problem & if they seem invested in getting an answer. It’s tricky to do & you don’t always get it right. But developing this skill over time can help you respond to better people who will engage back with you & actually let you know if your advice helped or failed them. Which is where I get the most satisfaction from.
I hope you enjoy your read. If you’re interested in joining our product community just like Noah, please go to our contribute page to learn more. You can also reach out to us through the following channels:
SUMO contributor discussions: https://support.mozilla.org/forums/
SUMO Matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/#sumo:mozilla.org
Twitter/X: https://x.com/SUMO_Mozilla