Advice on a support forum

Support
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Hello all.

I was looking for advice on starting a technical support site. I have looked at plenty of forum-based ones and found them lacking in appropriate structure and functionality.

Can anyone recommend a highly functional technical support solution? Is Discourse well suited to this application or may there some shortcomings which may make such a solution unsuitable?

I was hoping to track bugs, take issue reports from the public, document technical issues and their solutions with versioning and platform awareness so it logs mobile posts separate to desktop posts, etc, etc.

It needs to be highly organised and easy to access and use.

I considered writing my own, but thought I would check out current offerings. I have used Discourse on another support site but found it made information and solutions hard to find - Maybe it was misconfigured? Are there any tips/add-ons/etc to setting this up to be a leading tech support forum?

I am not bothered about the social features, I am more focussed on troubleshooting and documenting solutions and faults.

Also, is there a way to make public notes on what tags mean what in Discourse?

Many thanks.

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I mean look at us here on meta :laughing:

Discourse is a very good platform for a support forum as all content is easily searchable and split into categories & tags.

Can I ask why? Perhaps the other forum didnā€™t have some of the plugins listed below which would help your support community:

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In addition to plugin mentioned by @ondrej

This plugin was designed with support in mind.

Additional plugins of interest

These are pre packaged in Discourse

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Thank you for your reply. It is most informative.

a) The threads were long, meandering discussions and most posts held no useful information. I admit that I do find walking through someone elseā€™s support call a bit tedious and painful. I believe there is a more suitable way to request, gather, organise and display this information;

b) Lots of ā€˜stubā€™ posts with no replies or resolutions which are kept visible, for some reason - The threads are also closed so theyā€™re literally useless and just taking up space with no automatic removal or archival of dead or stub posts. and these are the ones that seem to show up in my searches most often. Maybe other people are just using different words?;

c) It may be the social aspect of the forum, but questions were not aggregated and only very basically organised into exclusionary categories, leading to separate but similar questions and missed solutions on different parts of the site;

d) There are so many redundant posts. As mentioned above, people use different terms for identical things, which makes searching for a previously asked question almost impossible unless you can think like someone else. This doesnā€™t seem to be taken into account by many admins (or devs?);

e) I thought that a more normalised dataset may help provide more consistent, current and appropriate information;

f) Automatic tagging so issues can be automatically assigned and allocated without tedious manual intervention, post husbandry and reorganisation;

Categories and tags are swings and roundabouts at this point, just different ways of doing, essentially, the same thing - itā€™s just semantic differences. Both are intended to segregate and separate information out for easier organisation and interrogation. I donā€™t think it matters which you use, TBH, as long as the Interface supports itā€™s use case.

g) Thereā€™s lots of unused screen space which could be used to display information. Currently, the page seems quite sparse and thin on functionality and easy access to common/recent/main features. On my screen, around 40-50% of the page is blank;

h) The date-based scrollbar to the right (in my experience) misses out the most recently dated replies/posts and doesnā€™t scroll fully;

I am sure these are all customisable and supported with the proper plug-ins as I have been advised, I just donā€™t see a lot of this type of thing about :confused:

I will have a look at those plug-ins and see if they are being used, thank you again.

I will have a look at those plug-ins, too. Thank you.

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Youā€™re very welcome.

With additionally there are full theme that include some prepackaged theme-component .

Theme components can be added to any themes be it the default theme or a custom one.

Iirc Western Digital I think it was sponsored the Docs plugin

There is a very wide number of companies that use Discourse as a support forum system.

A lot will come down to how you setup and configure things. You set things to auto close topics. Ie in Meta a solved topic is iirc set to auto close after x time after a solution is chosen by Op or Staff.

Checkout Documentation section here as they are experimenting with a more robust system in that area for better ease of use

If you would like someone to directly help designing and setting up your support forum marketplace is a great place to make the request. Imagine many if these folks will have samples of what they have done for others

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Thank you.

Sorry, I donā€™t think I understand what you mean :confused:

I didnā€™t get the link :confused:

I should be OK if there is the relevant information out there in an organised form lol

Autism sucks when youā€™re trying to find information on-line, itā€™s never organised well enough :wink:

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FWIW, in addition to our existing customers that use Discourse for technical support services, and our own public Meta Discourse forum here, we also run a full technical support forum in private categories dedicated to our enterprise customers. We assigned topics and posts to each other, use whisper conversations to discuss and resolve issues, and we have a team of dedicated tech support staff that work with those customers. Our internal company day to day operations also exists on Discourse. :discourse: :slight_smile:

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Themes generally do full visual customizations. Click on theme to view their topics. There is for example one that makes it look more like FB and Reddit.

theme-component are things that are installed to augment a variety of visual and interface elements.

Both the above make changes on the client or browser side.

plugin on the other hand made server side changes and can directly change things that the above cannot.

To view this goto the sidebar and click on Documentation

Screenshot_20240728-164416
Screenshot_20240728-164416864Ɨ1920 126 KB

The documentation category is using a new interface the team is testing out and makes finding a lot of info there much easier than previously.

plugin options will depend on whether you choose a hosted plan from a discourse provider or if you choose Self Hosted to have a full choice of plugins.

theme & theme-component are able to be installed on any discourse forum.

Hosted plans have the benefit of their teams be it Meta, Communique(so?), Pavilion, etc will have hosting plans with a set of plugins available to use.

  • Benefit? Included direct support and they maintain the back end.

Self-Hosted one needs to maintain their own server and if you run into a problem you canā€™t solve may need to use marketplace to pay someone to fix a problem.

  • Benefit? Much more flexibility

As @Lilly said the team has some excellent options with hosting.

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Checkout this theme

Goto the page and under resource click on demo. This will give an idea of how much you can customize the look. And well if you like Star wars pretty cool.

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Wow, thank you, a lot.

Thatā€™s a lot of info to read through.

I feel such a relief when I find what Iā€™m looking for on the Internet, nowadays lol <3

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I believe @simon helped set up a lot of support sites while he worked on the Discourse team. I remember that he has been advocating to make it easier for new admins to set up support sites on Discourse in future, with the idea of built-in templates or configurations and so on.

He might have some tips on configuring a support site on Discourse and what settings are best, or be able to link to some additional documentation here on Meta.

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Iā€™m not sure I can improve on this:

As others have noted, the Solved, Assign, and Docs plugins are useful for support sites.

Depending on how your team and forum are organized, whisper posts can be useful for allowing staff to have inline discussions about support questions.

I suspect the big difference between Discourse and a dedicated customer support platform is that Discourse doesnā€™t enforce a particular support workflow. Teams need to figure out how to use Discourse in a way that meets their needs. After establishing a work flow, it takes some discipline to stick with it. Depending on your point of view, this could be seen as a good or a bad thing. I personally think that Discourseā€™s flexibility makes for a good work environment. I wouldnā€™t have lasted long working with any of the dedicated support systems that Iā€™m aware of.

Many of the issues raised about long threads, stub posts, redundant posts, etc can be dealt with by actively moderating the site.

One thing thatā€™s not obvious from browsing Meta is that the Discourse team use it to provide two levels of support. Thereā€™s both a public support category thatā€™s accessible to everyone, and a private support system for Discourseā€™s hosted customers. The private support essentially functions as a ticketing system. Unless things have changed, assigning topics either to groups or individual team members (with the Assign plugin) accomplishes much of what tickets would accomplish in a dedicated support system. There are lots of benefits (and maybe a few downsides) to having both a public and a private support system on the same site.

I think Discourse should have something like a ā€œcustomer support templateā€ that would allow a customer support site to be configured from the setup wizard. Documentation about how to use Discourse for customer support should also be provided. Iā€™m tempted to fully document it here, but to do it well would probably require a few days of work.

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It is what drives autistic people to fix it! Discourse certainly has plenty of autistic people involved - and is definitely the better for it.

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