The Canned Response Add-On for Firefox
Mozilla relies on a community of volunteers to staff its help desk for the Firefox Web browser. To simplify the volunteers' work, Mozilla recommends they use canned responses to answer common questions. You can do this by cutting and pasting from Mozilla's Web pages or working through the Spark instant-message program.
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Volunteers
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If you're interest in serving as a Mozilla volunteer, create an account on Mozilla's website. Mozilla gives volunteers multiple options for helping users: Answer questions in the support forum; tweet answers on Twitter; engage directly with users on Live Chat; contribute articles to Mozilla's Knowledge Base; or convert the Knowledge Base to other languages, such as Finnish or Swedish. Mozilla provides forums and blogs for volunteers to communicate with each other.
Canned Responses
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Mozilla's website includes lists of canned responses anyone volunteering for Live Chat sessions might want handy. The responses include advice to journalists on contacting Mozilla's media affairs office; directions to useful Web pages; or information on handling a belligerent chatterer when they become abusive or violate Mozilla protocol. Mozilla also offers a list of useful questions for life chat, such as asking help-seeking users which version of Firefox they are using, and which operating system Firefox is running on.
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Add-Ons
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To volunteer for Live Chat, you have to download Spark . Once you have Spark installed on your computer, you can accept chat requests from individuals in Mozilla's queue, and you can employ Spark to deliver canned responses for you. Some software developers have made other canned-response add-ons available. Softpedia, for example, offers a free downloadable add-on that provides canned responses in the PHP bulletin-board discussion forums. Some Mozilla users have called for adding an element to the tool bar that will enable anyone to use canned responses.
Considerations
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Mozilla also provides a page of canned responses for editors on Mozilla's Wiki, though there's no add-on to apply them without cutting and pasting. Editors can use the responses to politely reject an idea for a new Mozilla add-on; to answer technical questions about modifying HTML and its effect on documents; and to explain when add-ons should use NPAPI plugins rather than XPCOM. As the Mozilla community constantly comes up with new add-ons, it's possible more canned-response offerings will develop.
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