Support/l10n:Feedback
Summary of feedback from Support localizers
Contents
Common sources of confusion
- Tikiwiki markup -- different from e.g. MediaWiki markup.
- The staging/review system.
- How translations work.
- The "Content may be out of date" warning.
- User groups and what permissions does each group have.
These are all things that make support.mozilla.com different from other wikis. A good introductory tutorial/screencast outlining how the system is different could probably help.
We have a bug for adding a thank you and explanation page after saving an edit (bug 446079). It would also be good if we could publicize what permissions each user group has.
Site performance and bugs are getting in the way
It's bad enough that the site is very slow, but after waiting, there are system bugs that cause a lot of confusion:
- Sometimes they cannot remove the "content may be out of date" warning, or it gets added for minor edits. Investigation shows that:
- Rejected edits still add the warning.
- If the staging copy does hot have a language assigned, removing the warning is impossible.
- It should be possible for a reviewer to "veto" the decision to mark an edit as significant. In other words, even if the author thought this edit was significant and checked the option, the reviewer should be able to uncheck it before approving the edit.
- Articles without a language. (FIXED, but we need to finish going through the list of articles without a language)
- Error when creating translation (bug 439029). Unclear if this is still an issue. The bug is not marked as fixed, but the target is still at 0.6)
- Articles not added to translation tables. (bug 447903 targeted for 0.8)
General site performance needs to become a high priority for 2009. We should also improve educating localizers about sumodev:
- What are common bugs that they should be aware of.
- Announce when any of those bugs have been fixed (and pushed to prod).
- Encourage people to use bugzilla for sumodev issues (sticky in contributors forum?).
Community/Communication
- People often need to find out who their locale leader is
- Reviewers may need to contact editors to ask about specific edits
- Knowing not only which locale a person contributes for, but also which OS is good to know.
- Want email notification for more things (article edits added to the waiting for review category, edit rejections/approvals, new users for each locale)
User lists should be available to everyone (doesn't have to contain contact info). People should be able to find out which users are registered per locale, what OS they use, and most importantly, there should be an identifier publicizing which groups that user is in (Admin, Locale leaders, Approvers, etc.). We should also have a way for these people to contact each other without making their email addresses public (i.e. private messaging system).
For public discussion, we decided to direct locale leaders to mozilla.dev.l10n.web, because the contributors forum was not up at the time. That has caused locale leaders not to be aware of important discussions in the Contributors forum. We should tell everyone to use the Contributors forum. Those who don't want to get that involved, can watch the blog.
This seems closely related to MozillaCRM. We should investigate which of our requirements will be covered by that system and decide whether or not we will use that or develop something on our own (e-mail sent to Jay Patel about status update).
Unsure what can and cannot be done
- Didn't know they can create articles that don't have an English equivalent.
- Didn't know they could link to their own web sites on their translations of Ask+a+question.
- Didn't know about or so-called "monkey rule" -- where we draw the line between content suitable for SUMO and content that's more aimed towards power users looking to tweak Firefox.
These are things that should be addressed in introductory material about general Firefox Support localization.
