Hello, SUMO Mozillians!

We have an important update regarding our site to share with you, so grab something cold/hot to drink (depending on your climate), sit down, and give us your attention for the next few minutes.

As you know, we have been hard at work for quite some time now migrating the site over to a new platform. You were a part of the process from day one (since we knew we needed to find a replacement for Kitsune) and we would like to once more thank you for your participation throughout that challenging and demanding period. Many of you have given us feedback or lent a hand with testing, checking, cleaning up, and generally supporting our small team before, during, and after the migration.

Over time and due to technical difficulties beyond our team’s direct control, we decided to ‘roll back’ to Kitsune to better support the upcoming releases of Firefox and related Mozilla products.

The date of ‘rolling forward’ to Lithium was to be decided based on the outcome of leadership negotiations of contract terms and the solving of technical issues (such as redirects, content display, and localization flows, for example) by teams from both sides working together.

In the meantime, we have been using Kitsune to serve content to users and provide forum support.

We would like to inform you that a decision has been made on Mozilla’s side to keep using Kitsune for the foreseeable future. Our team will investigate alternative options to improve and update Mozilla’s support for our users and ways to empower your contributions in that area.

What are the reasons behind this decision?

Technical challenges in shaping Lithium’s platform to meet all of Mozilla’s user support needs. The contributor community’s feedback and requirements for contributing comfortably. The upcoming major releases for Firefox (and related products) requiring a smooth and uninterrupted user experience while accessing support resources.

What are the immediate implications of this decision?

Mozilla will not be proceeding with a full ‘roll forward’ of SUMO to Lithium at this time. All open Lithium-related Bugzilla requests will be re-evaluated and may be closed as part of our next sprint (after the San Francisco All Hands). SUMO is going to remain on Kitsune for both support forum and knowledge base needs for now. Social support will continue on Respond. The SUMO team is going to kick off a reevaluation process for Kitsune’s technical status and requirements with the help of Mozilla’s IT team. This will include evaluating options of using Kitsune in combination with other tools/platforms to provide support for our users and contribution opportunities for Mozillians.

If you have questions about this update or want to discuss it, please use our community forums.

We are, as always, relying on your time and effort in successfully supporting millions of Mozilla’s software users and fans around the world. Thank you for your ongoing participation in making the open web better!

Sincerely yours,

The SUMO team

P.S. Watch the video from the first day of the SFO All Hands if you want to see us discuss the above (and not only).