Closed Bug 444302 Opened 16 years ago Closed 12 years ago

Provide a means to migrate support issues that are misfiled as bugs over to the support.mozilla.com forums.

Categories

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: General, enhancement)

enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: sdaugherty, Unassigned)

References

()

Details

Now that we actually have an active support community to direct technical issues to, it would be nice to have a function where when a user  submits a "bug" that turns out to actually be a support issue, we can reroute that bug report out of bugzilla and into support.mozilla.com

This would be easy to implement by
1) Adding a customization to BMO that will pass the URL to a bug's XML view to an interface on another site (support.mozilla.com) and then resolve that bug. (This would probably take the form of a link or a button with text like "Turn this into a question for support."
2) Adding an interface to support.mozilla.com to automatically create a forum posts  from the XML view of a bug when it's passed a URL from bugzilla.
the "answers" support system and bug tracker on www.launchpad.net are a good example of this functionality and how it can be used to streamline the handling of bugs >- support issues

although come to think of it... I wonder if this could partly be done with a bookmarklet...
ccing djst because of the sumo side of this.

I can probably provide a mockup later.
This sounds like an interesting idea. It involves a lot of small things that need to be fixed first, though:

* E-mail notification for anonymous forum threads on SUMO - this has been discussed and I'm about to file bugs for them shortly

* Ability to script creating a new forum post on SUMO - Not sure how this could be handled considering there's a captcha involved?

* (I assume) lots of backend stuff on Bugzilla itself

Until we have this, I think the right thing to do is to resolve the bug as INVALID and manually post a link to the created forum thread in the bug.
OS: Linux → All
Hardware: PC → All
Re #3 I suspect this is more work for the SUMO side of this than it is for bmo, the BMO side can almost be a bookmarklet - the process is would essentially be call a script on SUMO with a special URL, listen for a returned URL, insert boileplate text in the comments box, and resolve the bug invalid or incomplete.

On the SUMO side of things, you'd need a custom script to accept stuff from bugzilla (and only from bugzilla, since you'd be bypassing the captcha)

This doesn't seem to be horribly complex, and if we ever needed to go the other way (from a sumo thread to a bugzilla bug), we already know to to write URLs that will start the process of filing a bug with many of the fields prefilled, so this would also be easy.
So, this issue has once again come up.  And was pointed out on David Eaves' blog: http://eaves.ca/2010/07/20/some-thoughts-on-improving-bugzilla/ (it's thought number 3)

Given that we're already working toward a new backend for sumo, and that Guy is working on a bugzilla extension to talk to SUMO, it seems like the time is right to do something here.

The set of things we need is small, and we can roll them out in iterations.

So, the first iteration:
* We make a "SUPPORT" status for the RESOLVED status field.  This way, when a bug is filed that's really a support request, the triagers can quickly mark that as RESOLVED SUPPORT (this is different than RESOLVED INVALID, which is what they get marked now).

Next Iteration:
* With Guy's bugzilla extension (please correct me if I'm wrong), he can detect the mail that is going to be generated to the reporter of the bug that was marked RESOLVED SUPPORT and can generate a custom email to them.  That custom email will direct the person to SUMO, and may (if we can query this information from sumo, which it looks like we can already do) also contain a couple of suggested knowledge base articles for the reporter to look at (we'll find those by using the reporters comments as input to that query.  If we don't find anything we'll leave that section of the email blank and it will simply direct them to support options on sumo).

So, what we need right now from bugzilla.mozilla.org is the addition of a RESOLVED SUPPORT status.  We can start using that the moment it is implemented.

Do I need to file another bug for that (and make this a tracking bug), or is this comment sufficient?

This is certainly something we would like to do, so I'm going to confirm this enhancement request.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
I'd file another bug for adding the new resolution and make this a tracking bug. Part 2 relies on bug 65477 being ported to BMO, which would probably require Bugzilla 4.2 to be released (unless we want to port things to bmo that have not been released as part of Bugzilla). 

It would also require installing the Support extension which I will start writing as soon(i need to post to my blog about it first). The Support extension will be a generalized version of what SUMO wants. It will look for a "Support" resolution and if it doesn't exist it will make one. It will add a custom field called something like Support URL which will attempt to search the support tool for possible matches but also allow support people to just type in a URL that they know solves the users issue.

It will have the ability to add information to text emails and append html/css to html bug emails. For BMO we'll make sure that the HTML directs users to SUMO and is branded appropriately. 

My hope is that this extension can be used by the many instances of Bugzilla out there that also have a support website, not just BMO/SUMO.
David Eaves posted about this. I put the URL to david's blog post in the URL field. also
(In reply to comment #6)
> I'd file another bug for adding the new resolution and make this a tracking
> bug. Part 2 relies on bug 65477 being ported to BMO, which would probably
> require Bugzilla 4.2 to be released (unless we want to port things to bmo that
> have not been released as part of Bugzilla). 
> 
I'll file another bug for the resolution field and make this our tracking bug.

I'm not sure about your second question.  In my mind, if we can do a thorough review, security review, and testing of the new components, I don't have any qualms about landing these new pieces of bugzilla on BMO and simultaneously upstreaming them to BMO.  The BMO maintainers may have other ideas on that subject, but I think that should be manageable.  It's really no different from working on a forked instance of a open source project and upstreaming fixes to it -- we do the same thing with buildbot.

> It would also require installing the Support extension which I will start
> writing as soon(i need to post to my blog about it first). The Support
> extension will be a generalized version of what SUMO wants. It will look for a
> "Support" resolution and if it doesn't exist it will make one. It will add a
> custom field called something like Support URL which will attempt to search the
> support tool for possible matches but also allow support people to just type in
> a URL that they know solves the users issue.
Does this mean we don't need the support resolution?  I must be reading this wrong.  I think we still need the support resolution in BMO, right?
> 
> It will have the ability to add information to text emails and append html/css
> to html bug emails. For BMO we'll make sure that the HTML directs users to SUMO
> and is branded appropriately. 
> 
Cool.
> My hope is that this extension can be used by the many instances of Bugzilla
> out there that also have a support website, not just BMO/SUMO.
I hope so too.
Depends on: 592533
Component: Bugzilla: Other b.m.o Issues → General
Product: mozilla.org → bugzilla.mozilla.org
closing bug due to inactivity.  please re-open this bug if still relevant.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 12 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
I'd like to flag that I think this bug could help reduce a fair bit of work load. Sad to see it resolved WONTFIX. Again, if anyone is interested in picking this thread up, I'd happy to supply whatever support I can.

Dave Eaves
Given that the message is "please re-open" incomplete is more appropriate. Marking as such so as not to scare off potential takers!
Resolution: WONTFIX → INCOMPLETE
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