In my not so humble opinion generating a graph like this from a database shouldn't require a 70 line ruby script!

Presentation created for June 30, 2011 Vancouver Ruby / Rails meetup (flickr set, slideshare, pdf)

See my Better Support Living through Software for the full details

And just for fun here are the flickr pics of the slides:

I. Better Living

II. Just Say No

III.We Can Do This

IV. Support Comes to You!

V. Fork this!

Manual Support Forum browsing is soooo 1990s and a waste of support folks' time aka my Get Satisfaction Thunderbird API ruby and Mongo DB side project finally has born fruit :-) ! Seriously if you are manually searching your support forums and don't have customized support querying and reporting  so vital, can't miss stuff comes to your support contributors via email (or some other semi-automated method like RSS or whatever) then you are doing support wrong.

I wrote a Ruby script to read via Get Satisfaction pseudo-REST API all the Thunderbird Support Topics into a MongoDB and wrote a ruby script to generate  a custom email support report  so cool, relevant, urgent stuff comes to me instead of me having to surf the forums.

Not only that I wrote a brute force search engine that allows searching the fulltext of all 40000 Get Satisfaction topics and tags via regexes.

Even cooler: Anybody who uses Get Satisfaction for support can use my code!!!!!!! All you have to do is:

1. change "mozilla_messaging" to your Get Satisfaction company name
2. change "mozilla_thunderbird" to your product name
3. configure a gmail account config file called email.conf with 3 lines:
1. from_address
2. to_address
3. p for your password

Finally, here's the README which serves as the documentation

(since this is a side project, the README is shall we say lacking :-); I hope to somehow get this into the SUMO project so that all support contributors not just me can use it; to this end I am writing a spec for this, fingers crossed)

Roland's utilities for Get Satisfaction Metrics and other GS fun stuff

• hardcoded for now for the Thunderbird product i.e. getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_message/products/thunderbird
• easily hackable for any other product
• forgive the barebones documentation for this project :-) !
• HELP WANTED: would love for a real developer to fix this code and enhance it
• email rtanglao AT mozilla.com if you are interested

Prerequisites:

• requires a MongoDB running on local host with a database called "gs"
• and with collection in the gs database called "topics"

Usage:

Update the Mongo - ALWAYS do this first before running anything else!

./mongoUpdateSlurpGS.rb 2011 6 16 2011 6 19 2>mongoslurp.16-19june2011.818pm.stderr.txt & 

Daily email metrics (I run this twice a day, typically 9a.m. and 4p.m. Pacific)

./emailDailyMetrics.rb & 

Weekly Metrics to CSV files and stdout (run once a week to generate support metrics for the Thunderbird Project Call)

./weeklyMetrics.rb 2011 6 13 2011 6 19 2>13-19june2011.stderr.txt 1>13-19june2011.stdout.txt 

Search the Thunderbird Get Satisfaction MongoDB for regexes in the fulltext (title+content+replies) & tags

e.g. for Thunderbird 5 here's a sample search ("-r" is a comma separated list of regexes to search the fulltext for and "-s" is a comma separated list of regexes to search tags for)

./bruteforceSearch.rb 2011 6 1 2011 6 30 2>19june2011.tb5b1.bfs.stderr.1020pm.txt 1>19june2011.tb5b1.bfs.stdout.1020pm.txt -r tb5, "tb 5","thunderbird5","thunderbird 5",beta -s "tb 5",tb5,thunderbird5,"thunderbird 5","beta feedback",50,tb5,"tb 5",beta