New Support Questions on SUMO

This week, we pushed version 2.2 of support.mozilla.com (SUMO). The main feature in this release was our new Support Questions feature, replacing the old Firefox Support Forum.

The Support Questions, designed by the inimitable Chris Howse,  take advantage of a number of HTML5 and CSS3 features to improve the look and experience: rounded corners, background gradients, placeholder and accept attributes, and more.

We are also using a number of server-side technologies now available to us to improve performance. From the database layer—we moved from MyISAM to InnoDB tables and improved the schema—to the views—we are using Celery to offload non-real-time tasks, like email notifications and thumbnail generation, from the web server thread—we have built a system designed for speed, which we hope our users will feel.

So check out the new Support Questions on SUMO. If you’re already a SUMO contributor, we hope you’ll be as excited about the new platform as we are. If you’re not, this is a great time to start! As always, we welcome feedback and contributions. You can find all the source code on Github.

1 response

  1. Tiago Sá wrote on :

    I just have on problem with it: I need to manually get the threads I contribute to to email me when a user posts something. Before, I’d just leave the box ticked and everywhere I’d post, they’d all be subscribed to. Now it’s harder.

    It also seems that fewer people are posting in the forums, much probably due to the fact that there’s no anonymous posting anymore (by the way, when you’re creating an account, it still says you can anonpost). I don’t know if this is good or bad, but it certainly will make it more manageable. And we basically killed all the “me too”s, which is another point to it. It’s fantastic, and super fast.

    The other one felt like it was constantly on maintenance, so slow it was 😛