523455 - createaccount is pretty hostile

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

Attachment: Current appearance

I understand how we got to where we are with the contents on createaccount - too many people trying to use bugzilla for tech support, too many people emailing bugzilla admins looking for the same.

Having said that, I just sent the createaccount URL to someone who might help us with a bug, and sort of regretted it, because it's such an unfriendly introduction to bugzilla (an intimidating tool at the best of times).

There is BOLD TEXT in several places which mostly serves to highlight that you will be ignored if you do things wrong. The link to support is a good idea, but I think insufficiently prominent, especially if we consider this to be as common an error as we appear to.

I think we could simplify this, and make it a lot prettier.

Comment 1

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

Attachment: A hopelessly naive, to say nothing of hamfisted, mockup

Ugly, sure, but can we agree that this is friendlier?

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Ooooh, I like that.  The admin email is sufficiently fine print that they have to be conscientiously looking for it to find it, and it still says they can't help you with anything other than Bugzilla. :)

My only concern is that we may want to put more emphasis (be it wording or whatever) on the fact that your email address is public.  Even with the boldface print we have on the existing signup page, we still periodically get email from users pissed off that spammers got their email address from us because they didn't pay attention to the warning on the signup page (although that happens much less frequently since we added that "Privacy Notice" block that explicitly spelled it out like that).

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

The upstream version of this page can be viewed at https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip/createaccount.cgi

Comment 4

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Might want to link to Hendrix in addition to the support sites, for people who want to provide quick feedback without having to create an account.

Comment 5

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

The email address visibility point can probably be sufficiently driven home by adding "potentially including spammers" after "visible to others", so the sentence would read "Remember that Bugzilla is a public place, so what you type here, and the email address you use, will be visible to others, potentially including spammers." or somesuch.

Comment 6

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> The email address visibility point can probably be sufficiently driven home by
> adding "potentially including spammers" after "visible to others", so the
> sentence would read "Remember that Bugzilla is a public place, so what you type
> here, and the email address you use, will be visible to others, potentially
> including spammers." or somesuch.

Yeah - Or even:

Remember that Bugzilla is a public place, so what you do here, and the email address you use, will be visible to others (including spammers). Many people use an alternate email address for this reason.

"alternate email address" could be linkified to point to gmail/hotmail/whatever, indeed we could linkify each word to point to a different provider, if we didn't want to be preferential (though I am certain I don't care :).

Comment 7

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

(Note that the inclusion of the etiquette/guidelines link would also resolve bug 454605)

Comment 8

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

added template/en/custom/account
added template/en/custom/account/create.html.tmpl
Committed revision 6670.

https://bugzilla-stage-tip.mozilla.org/createaccount.cgi

Comment 9

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

Nice! Thanks, Dave!

I don't know where these files live, in order to offer you a diff, but I noticed that the products boxes aren't centered for me - so I did some firebug tweaking to get it there.

If you replace the table below "Did you just need tech support" with the following:

<div id="product_support_links">
  <div class="support_div" style="float:left;">
    <img align="left" src="skins/custom/producticons/firefox.png"/>MOZILLA FIREFOX<br/><a href="http://support.mozilla.com/">Click here if you need help using Mozilla Firefox.</a>
  </div>
  <div class="support_div" style="float:right;">
    <img align="left" src="skins/custom/producticons/thunderbird.png"/>MOZILLA THUNDERBIRD<br/><a href="http://www.mozillamessaging.com/support/">Click here if you need help using Mozilla Thunderbird.</a>
  </div>
  <div class="support_div" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; clear: both;">
    <img align="left" src="skins/custom/producticons/dino.png"/>NOT IN THIS LIST?<br/><a href="http://www.mozilla.org/support/">Click here if you need help using Mozilla software not listed on this page.</a>
  </div>
</div>

and then add these style rules, somewhere:

.support_div {
    width: 40%;
    font-size: 80%;
}

.support_div > img {
  padding: 5px 20px;
}


The box should center itself, and the icons will add a little bit of spacing around themselves. If you want, point me at the file and I'll create a proper diff for your perusal.

Comment 10

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

Attachment: Styling tweaks

Comment 9 in patch form. Could file a follow up bug if you prefer, but I thought this might work as a fly-along.

I added the rules to global.css since there doesn't seem to be a per-page CSS file, and the template doesn't look like it wants me to mess around in the <head> block.

Comment 11

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

Attachment: Styling tweaks, fixed missing newline

Comment 12

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

modified skins/custom/global.css
modified template/en/custom/account/create.html.tmpl
Committed revision 6677.