Die letzten Wochen und Monate habe ich dieses Weblog aufgrund mangelnder Zeit sträflichst vernachlässigt. Dabei wollte ich schon mal über die wundervolle und rasante Entwicklung von Firefox 3.1 und Thunderbird 3 erzählen, die im ersten Quartal 2009…

If you mean the review queue, then unfortunately that is an unavoidable overhead. We need to be able to do a quality check before an edit is immediately seen by thousands of people, since anyone has the power to edit articles. What we can do, though, is making the review process more straightforward and discoverable for existing reviewers. Also, a locale can have as many reviewers as they want. If you know of a SUMO editor that should become a reviewer, we can give him or her that power right away.

Happy to hear more from you and the German community about the SUMO experiences! If there are people you think we should reach out to specifically, please let us know.

Again, thank you very much for posting your feedback about SUMO. It’s with feedback like this we’re able to move forward and turn SUMO into a great solution for both users and contributors.

Yes, this is very neat, both for contributors and users. I think it could become even better if there was a WYSIWYG way of editing the articles too, to make this even simpler to use.

“SUMO still has some annoying bugs like not working language sniffing.”

There are definitely some problems here still. If you have specific examples, please file bugs so we get them on our radar.

“One big problem is, that even a punctuation correction in the English version marks the German version outdated. This is a known bug, but still unfixed.”

This is a misunderstanding in how that feature is meant to be used. See relevant bugs https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=431501 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=456119.

“People say that SUMO ist too slow to work with. That’s why they prefer other options.”

Yes, this is a very known problem. We have some plans on how to make the forum perform better in the short term, but long term we need to look more closely on the overall performance and see what we can do to improve it.

“People think that SUMO has a corporate feel to itself and are afraid that they won’t be able to write as freely as they can do on the community wiki.”

This is interesting, but I think mostly a misunderstanding. Any locale is free to write support articles that solve common problems. The only thing to keep in mind is SUMO’s focus, which is to solve people’s support problems and not for example tinker with the browser to do amazing things (e.g. a userChrome.css hack to move the sidebar to the right). For those amazing things, we have AMO.

But there’s absolutely no obligation to only write support articles that already exist in English. However, if there is a need for a specific German article for example, it might still be a good idea to post about it in the Contributor forum so the English article writers can make a judgment on whether or not this would make sense to have in English (and other languages) as well.

thanks for the very complete write-up!

Nitpick: you’re still advertising Firefox 2 in your sidebar

Regarding mozilla.de, I strongly suggest that it redirects to mozilla-europe.org/de/ where people can find our support page which would lead people to various support forums and documentation. I don’t think that adding yet another specific website is going to help, and it’s really not scalable anyway, as we have dozens more languages to cover in Europe.

Dria, forums are very fragile things. The community that builds up over the years doesn’t move easily to another forum. We should discuss that, but it`s not an easy thing to do

I would like to see us experiment with a single, centralized web forum system for all Mozilla community discussions and coordination. I expect there are a lot more people in our community who do not use or know about the newsgroups than we expect. I am very interested in helping with this from an Evangelism/Project communications standpoint, and will start discussing this as a potential experiment with the Evangelism team.