Support/Forum launch

The plan

1. Implement 0.3 features - See Bugzilla for assignments - Dec 15
2. Test forums - Dec 15 - 19
3. Create how-to's for contributors - jason - Dec 16 - [1]
4. Point sidebar to forums on stage (does this get pulled along in the sync?) - nelson - Dec 17
5. Sync production server - IT - Dec 17
6. Announce launch. Include or link to how-to's in announcement - jason - Dec 19
7. Monitor server status - morgamic - Dec 19 - 22
   • Take appropriate action for server load problems. - morgamic, nelson
8. Monitor quality of service (Answered forum thread ratio, Average forum thread answer time) - djst - Dec 19 - Jan 1
   • Take appropriate action for QoS problems. Possible actions:
     • Recruit new members from mozillaZine - jason
     • Throttle (as in "place limits on", not "choke") end users until more contributors come along

Open issues

• The number of people seeking help will go from 0 to lots as soon as we flip the switch. Do we know the server will be able to handle the load? Contributors likely won't go from 0 to lots, it'll be a gradual ramp-up. Will we be able to help everyone quickly?
  • Make some estimates for the traffic we'll get (see below)
  • Can we throttle the number of users that reach the forums?
• What legal requirements are there for showing users the terms of use?
• Do we have a way of automatically gather the QoS metrics yet?

Traffic estimates

Some numbers:

• 2,600 sessions per day on sumo
• 130 threads per day on forums.mozillazine.org

Will likely start out with less than mozillaZine because they currently get all our forum-seeking traffic as well as search and direct visitors.

Throttling users

Don't want to randomly show a link to sumo or mozillaZine forums - users would get confused when they can't get back to where they were.

Show links to both forums. Use the order in which they appear and warning text ("alpha", "testing") to manage the user's flow.