Since Thunderbird 3.0 shipped last week, our community support traffic has increased dramatically. We have roughly three times the number of support topics as well as 15 times the amount of traffic. Needless to say we need help!

Do you use Thunderbird? Always wanted to contribute to a open source project but don’t know how? But you love explaining things and helping others? Then helping our community support  Thunderbird is a great way to start.

You don’t have to be a coder or be “technical”. Just somebody uses Thunderbird and wants to help other Thunderbird users.

Here’s how to start:

1. Join Get Satisfaction (you can use your Facebook, Google, Twitter or Open ID login if you don’t want to create another login)
2. Read our Get Satisfaction README which succinctly explains how to use it.
3. Download and start using Thunderbird 3.0 if you aren’t already a Thunderbird 3.0 user (NB: if you are a Thunderbird 2.0 user and depend on  add-ons like Lightning, we recommend holding off on upgrading to 3.0 until those add-ons are available for 3.0. And of course it’s always worthwhile doing a backup)
4. Use the dashboard at http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/ to figure out where you can help
5. Get in where you fit in i.e. help where you can by replying to support topics, and by tagging,
   

Questions? Need help on using Get Satisfaction and providing Thunderbird community support? Email me: roland AT mozillamessaging.com or ask myself (I am generally on there M-F 10am.-5p.m Pacific) and the other folks on the IRC chat channel  #gsfn on irc.mozilla.org

After two and a half months on the job and in the process getting immersed in Mozilla Messaging’s initial implementation of Get Satisfaction for Thunderbird community support, it’s time for some reflection.

At Bryght and Raincity where we used Get Satisfaction sparingly, I had a vague sense of happiness with it but it’s only until you actually use something extensively  as I have, given the veritable “flood” of Thunderbird support, do you have a sense of how it really works and how it works well:

• Get Satisfaction is a community support solution and was designed that way. Forums which we tried to use at Bryght, are not. Forums are more akin to town hall meetings and town hall meetings are great but not for support.
• Modern technology makes a difference. Some examples: Get Satisfaction has tags which are a great, great way to track support requests as well as for the community to self categorize support requests. It also has full RSS and email notifications. And a full REST API (which I am using currently on a personal basis for metrics gathering but that will be used more by the Mozilla Messaging web presence in the future)

Of course nothing is perfect, I (and others) have lots of suggestions (e.g. APIs for Last Employee and comments) for improvement some of which I have filed with Get Satisfaction in Get Satisfaction of course and more to be documented soon.