Kan een beheerder een staged gebruiker aanmaken?

[tknospdr (David Muszynski)]

I asked this in another thread, but it’s last post before mine was 5 years ago, so maybe it won’t get as much attention as a new topic.

I have a question from a non-devleoper’s perspective.

I’m using Discourse as our company’s ticket system and I have it set up successfully to create new topics from non-registered users in our support forum.

Occasionally, I need to create a ticket on behalf of a customer instead of them creating it directly.

Is there an easy step by step way to do this and create a topic on behalf of someone that does not already have an account on the forum? I don’t want them to have a full account unless they sign up for one themselves.

If it has to be done from a command line interface, that’s fine, but I need some hand holding such as:

1. Enter container with foo
2. Type rails bar etc etc
3. Whatever else needs to be done

I’m aware that I can reassign posts so if it’s too complicated to do everything, just the instructions to create the user, then using the GUI to change owner would be very helpful.

As long as I can write a detailed help desk article for the rest of the staff to follow I don’t care what it entails. Would be awesome not to have to have all staff needing access to the container via ssh, but we’ll make due if that’s unavoidable.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

Do you have an email from the customer? if so you can forward it to Discourse and it will create a staged user for them.

There’s a little on this behavior here in the “forwarded emails behavior” I think you’d want to change the relevant setting to “create replies”

Configuring incoming email to create new topics or group messages

This guide explains how to set up incoming emails to create new topics or group messages in Discourse, including configuration of site settings and category or group-specific settings. Required user level: Administrator This guide covers: Enabling and configuring incoming emails Choosing between category and group for incoming emails Setting up incoming emails for a group Setting up incoming emails for a category Deciding how forwarded emails are handled …

[tknospdr (David Muszynski)]

@awesomerobot

Do you have an email from the customer? if so you can forward it to Discourse and it will create a staged user for them.

Not generally a direct e-mail. Most of the time it’s my boss forwarding me an e-mail from the customer and asking me to turn it into a ticket in order to reply to them.
I’m guessing all that would do is create the topic using my boss’s e-mail as the user assigned to who created the ticket.

[tobiaseigen]

Je kunt ook een voorlopige gebruiker aanmaken door hen simpelweg een PM te sturen en het e-mailadres als ontvanger te plakken. Als ze nog geen lid zijn, krijgen ze een voorlopig gebruikersaccount. Als ze later inloggen met hetzelfde e-mailadres, zal hun account op magische wijze transformeren en zien ze hun PM’s op de site.

[tknospdr (David Muszynski)]

Dit is waarschijnlijk het antwoord dat ik zocht. Ik laat het weten zodra ik de kans krijg om het uit te proberen.

[tobiaseigen]

Nog een leuke truc, als je een groep gebruikt om de afhandeling van tickets met een team te delen, is om die groep op te nemen wanneer je de PM verstuurt. Op die manier wordt deze vanuit de groep verzonden en komen eventuele antwoorden ook terug naar de groep.

[tknospdr (David Muszynski)]

Goed om te weten, maar ik heb het ticketsysteem zo ingesteld dat alles binnen Discourse blijft.

Het werkt tot nu toe erg goed, behalve bij één klant die hun eigen ticketsysteem gebruikt om ondersteuningsverzoeken naar ons te sturen. Zodra ik meer duidelijkheid heb over het probleem, kan ik een ander onderwerp starten om hen te helpen.

[tobiaseigen]

Oh wacht, ik weet niet zeker waarom ik “google group” schreef - ik heb mijn bericht gecorrigeerd. Ik bedoelde natuurlijk een Discourse groep.

[tknospdr (David Muszynski)]

Dat is logischer, maar we gebruiken eigenlijk geen groepen. We gebruiken alleen accounts en onderwerpen om tickets bij te houden.

[tknospdr (David Muszynski)]

@tobiaseigen

You can also create a staged user by simply sending them a PM, and pasting in the email address as the recipient. If they are not a member already then they will have a staged user account. If they log in later using the same email address, their account will transform magically and they will see their PMs on the site.

This used to work for us. I just had to use it again and now I get a pop up message that says:
An error occurred: You must select a valid user.

Any idea how to get this working again?

[tobiaseigen]

Are you an admin or moderator, or in a group that is specified in the Send email messages allowed groups site setting? If not, then that error makes sense.

[Moin]

@tobiaseigen

Send email messages allowed groups site setting? If not, then that error makes sense.

I think then you see a different error

This error seems to be caused by another check that checks for a username, group, or email address entered into the recipient field

lib/topic_creator.rb

@tknospdr what exactly did you enter into the recipient field? Was there anything special about that e-mail address?

[tknospdr (David Muszynski)]

I am logged in as the site admin when this error occurs.

I’m using a plus address to test with but the error first occurred when I tried to create a new user as I have done in the past and got the same result.

[Moin]

Sending PMs as an email definitely works for me. I don’t understand why it doesn’t work for you. Maybe it would help if you recorded an example? You can enter something like discourse@example.com so you don’t need to share an email address.

[tknospdr (David Muszynski)]

Well that’s SO odd. I just tried with example@example.com and it worked.

So it doesn’t work with “+” addresses, and I suppose there could have been something odd about the original client’s address that sparked this issue in the first place.
We’ve already gone the long way around to get them into the system so I’m not sure what was up.

Thanks again for the help, even though it turns out to be a non-issue!

[tobiaseigen]

Is Normalize emails enabled on your site, perchance?

Check if normalized email is unique. Normalized email removes all dots from the username and everything between + and @ symbols.

When I enable that setting, the error message when I use an email address with + character, I get is this:

An error occurred: One of the users you are sending this message to could not be found.

When I disable the setting, the PM is created and the staged user is created and gets the email.

[tknospdr (David Muszynski)]

Yes, normalized emails was checked, it turned it off and now I can create staged users with plus addressing.

After further testing that only allows me to create plus addresses when there’s already another user (me for instance) using the normalized version of the address.
Even with it checked I could do a random plus address IE test+this@thing.com was created, but david+test@example.com wasn’t created since david@example.com already existed.
I guess that’s as expected.

[tobiaseigen]

@tknospdr

After further testing that only allows me to create plus addresses when there’s already another user (me for instance) using the normalized version of the address.

I’ve never noticed that but if it’s intentional then that is indeed very clever! That is kind of the point of it.. to allow you to use one email address to create a bunch of test user accounts.