1063790 - [SUMO]: Forum / Community participation guidelines are hard to find. There should be links to them in several places.

Status: NEW

(support.mozilla.org :: General, defect, P2)

Description

[Fabian Rodriguez:MagicFab]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0 Iceweasel/31.0
Build ID: 20140803010241

Steps to reproduce:

When responding to user support requests, as a contributor, I expect them to follow the Forum guidelines and Community participations guidelines (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/participation/), know about them or at least be able to find them. I tried to find such guidelines after remembering seeing them somewhere and I couldn't. During an exchange with a moderator he brought back the link: 
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forum-rules-and-guidelines


Actual results:

During a support exchange I wanted to point to the Forum / Community participation Guidelines expecting there to be a direct link on the SUMO "ask a question" page and on the "Post a Reply" form, but there wasn't any. The corresponding URLs are:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/new
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1018518 (example forum question without any link to guidelines)


Expected results:

There should be prominent links to the Forum Guidelines (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forum-rules-and-guidelines) and Community Participation guidelines (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/participation/) on places where users and contributors can post messages as part of their interaction in the SUMO context.

There may be other places (footer, other communities within Mozilla) where this would be important too, but this bug report is specifically about the online SUMO resources.

Comment 1

[Alice Wyman]

(In reply to Fabian Rodriguez from comment #0)

> There should be prominent links to the Forum Guidelines
> (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forum-rules-and-guidelines) and
> Community Participation guidelines
> (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/participation/) on
> places where users and contributors can post messages as part of their
> interaction in the SUMO context.
> 
I agree that we should link to the "Forum rules and guidelines" SUMO article on pages where users are about to post a new thread (e.g., the "aaq-question" step at the end of the "Ask a Question" process). I think that we should also link to the "Forum rules and guidelines" article on pages where people can post replies, such as in the "Post a reply" box.  

I don't think that we also need a link to "Community Participation guidelines" in those places.   The "Forum rules and guidelines" article could link to it (it already links to https://www.mozilla.org/about/legal/) but that's another discussion.

Comment 2

[Alice Wyman]

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/refreshing-the-community-guidelines/20090 links to a SUMO Community Guidelines proposal,
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zrdUIW8EuKl8yiYicezNVBgBcZDUE0qiFgjFlM6MRzI/edit# that mentions at the top,
"the easiest way to do so is by adding this content to the KB and linking to it from the login form". 
I added a comment to the google doc with a link to this bug report.

Comment 3

[vesper]

Thanks for all the insights. To clarify and summarize:

Locations where we should link from:

1. End page of the "Ask a Question" flow (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/new/***/***/form?search=***&step=aaq-question)
2. Under the "Post a reply" text box on any forum page
3. Under the log in section on the log in page: https://support.mozilla.org/users/auth
4. The site footer

Locations we should link to:

1. "Forum rules and guidelines" SUMO article (to be updated with revised content) - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forum-rules-and-guidelines. This page will include a link to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/participation/

Comment 4

[Alice Wyman]

Related discussion:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forum-rules-and-guidelines/discuss/7421 Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines
^ New link: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozilla-support-rules-guidelines/discuss/7421 (renamed article)

Comment 5

[Alice Wyman]

See also bug 1630720 on adding a Get Help -> Ask the Community link to the Forum rules and guidelines.

Note that the https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forum-rules-and-guidelines article has been renamed Mozilla Support rules and guidelines. The article includes a prominent link to the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines in the Intro.

Comment 6

[Alice Wyman]

It should also be noted that the Contributor Tools -> Community Hub page now links to both the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines and the Mozilla Support rules and guidelines under "Community participation guidelines" (bottom left).