How to navigate the support forum platform

In this chapter we will go over the navigation fundamentals of answering a question, filtering and being notified from the support forum. This may take 20 mins.

Step 1 Finding a product

Choose any product to begin with. Currently the products supported in the forum include all that are in the image above: Firefox for Desktop, Firefox for Android, Firefox OS, Webmaker, and Thunderbird. Select one to get started.

Step 2 Learning about the Filters

Above is the questions page that has all of the questions of a particular product or all the questions if you chose all. To get yourself oriented check out the top where you will see a drop down "All Topics" that will allow you to filter questions by a particular general subtopic. Below this there is a progress bar that includes the number of questions that have been asked in the last 24 hours. Each day we try to answer all of the questions to provide a reasonable response time. This progress bar shows how we are doing.

Take notice of the filters that are located underneath the progress bar at the top of the forum. Each of these will filter through questions that are at different parts of their life cycle. For example, Attention needed are questions whose last response is from the question owner. Where Responded and Done are questions that have been responded to already or have been solved. All questions will list all questions.

It gets even more granular in the right column where you can filter by new questions, questions with answers that have been voted unhelpful, and questions that have been escalated for admin's or specialists attention.

The filters on the right are viewed below:

Sort Options include:

• "Updated": sort by the most updated question
• "Views": sort by the number of people who have viewed the question
• "Votes": sort by the number of votes people have voted "me too"
• "Replies": sort by the number of replies are in the thread

Show Me options include:

• "Posts From Everyone": includes all of the posts from all contributors
• "My Contributions": includes only the questions that you have contributed to

Step 3 Editing a Response

Above are the question tools that are located on the right column of all questions posted by users. They include Question Tools, Question Details, Tags and Related.

Question Tools include:

• "Get Email Updates": this will turn email updates on or off for this question.
• "Subscribe to Feed": this will subscribe or unsubscribe you from the question, even if you have not added content to the question.

Question Details include:

• "Product": lists the product the question is about

• "Topic": Lists a sub topic of the product.

• "System Details": this information is gathered at the beginning of the question and includes the version of the operating system and the product version number. Note the "More System Details" link. When clicked a pop up with the troubleshooting information will be included.

The troubleshooting information will not always include as much detail as this if the user did not include the troubleshooting information in the original question. However, above you will notice Plugins, application information, Extensions, Javascript and Graphics information. If you open your browser to [about:support] you will see the same information on this page in a different format.

Tags include: These are tags that include additional detail about the question. These are also used for tracking topic trends for questions.

Related includes: This section includes a list of questions that are related to the content in the question. They provide additional information and discussion on the current question.

In the "Post a Reply" section there are some icons that will help format the response to the question. From left to right: bold, italic, add a link, insert a numbered list, insert a bullet list, and common responses.

The two to note help find content to the response is to add a link and add a common response. In the add a link, you can highlight text and add a link to the text, or can search for an existing article to link to from the knowledge base. If you click on the Common responses link, you will find that there are a bunch of responses that have already been written for the most common issues that come up in the forum. Please feel free to try one!

The needs more information box on the bottom is used for requesting more information from the question owner. Once flagged for more information, the user will be able to check in whether or not they are providing this information.

Step 4 Email notification of Response

Check your email for when another response will come in. If you do not want to recieve responses from this thread then be sure to use the tools from the prevous step.