Create or improve common forum responses

Revision Information
  • Revision id: 348031
  • Created:
  • Creator: Mozinet
  • Comment: a few corrections (topographic, serial commas)
  • Reviewed: Yes
  • Reviewed:
  • Reviewed by: AliceWyman
  • Is approved? Yes
  • Is current revision? No
  • Ready for localization: Yes
  • Readied for localization:
  • Readied for localization by: AliceWyman
Revision Source
Revision Content

This article explains how to create or improve common forum responses that are available to contributors for use in support forum replies. Other considerations such as using wiki markup or renaming existing forum responses are also covered.

Editing a forum response

After checking whether there are any pending revisions for the response you wish to edit, click the Edit Article link under Editing Tools, make your edits and submit your revision. See this article for detailed steps.

Adding a new forum response

To add a new forum response, simply create a new article. You can use this link.

  1. Make sure the article title starts with “Forum response -” and that the article is in the Canned Responses category. Also, don't use a colon in the article title, since that will prevent wiki links (bug 749835).
  2. Add a link to the new canned response article under the appropriate heading in the common forum responses article. If no heading is available, add a new one, like this:

== Heading under which you want the response to be ==

[[Forum response - Test response|Label you want the response to have]]

Review and approval

A Knowledge Base reviewer will review your new or edited forum response. Please contact a KB reviewer or staff member if your submission requires immediate attention or hasn't been reviewed in a reasonable amount of time. You can also contact KB reviewers by sending an email to kb-reviewers@mozilla.com.

Warning to reviewers: Forum responses that appear in the common forum responses list will be available to contributors in the support forum, even though the response itself hasn't been approved (bug 986912). When reviewing the common forum responses list, make sure that newly added forum responses are approved or else make a new edit to delete (or comment out) the unapproved response from the list.

Other considerations

Renaming a response

If you just want to change how the response appears in the support forum “Common responses” tool, simply edit the common forum responses article and change the label you want the response to have. If you also want to change the title of the response article itself, a KB article reviewer will need to edit the article metadata to change the title.

Warning to reviewers: If you edit the Description of a “Forum response” article and change the title, its link in the common forum responses article MUST be updated with the new title. Otherwise, the support forum “Common responses” tool will show a redirect to the renamed article instead of the content, as shown in this screenshot.

Wiki markup

Please be careful using wiki markup. Keep in mind that certain formatting will show up in the “Forum response” article but won't work when the response is posted to the support forum. For example:

  • DO NOT use “show-for” code, as described in How to use "For" tags.
  • DO NOT use “styling” markup for keyboard shortcuts, buttons, menus notes and warnings, such as {key }, {button }, {menu }, {note}text{/note} and {warning}text{/warning}.
  • DO NOT use templates, such as [[T:aboutconfig]] and [[T:optionspreferences]].

A list of markup that works in both articles and in forum posts is included in the Markup chart article. Please only use markup that works in forum posts.