After a lot of testing, we finally rolled out our Discourse support ticketing function.
I’ve immediately been smacked in the face with some show stopping issues that I hope can be overcome somehow.
We have a category/subcategory called Support/Support Requests
Support requests is set to use private topics so that only authors and support staff can see the posts in any given topic. It also has email turned on as most of our tickets come in that way.
We have one customer that uses their own ticketing system to send us support requests, I believe it’s called RepairShopr. When we get a ticket from them:
We don’t get the entire ticket, all I see is a useless bit of fluff before the actual info. See screenshot below.
Every time they reply their software creates a new topic instead of posting in the original topic
I could deal with that using the move posts function, however, because the topics are private, they don’t show up in the list of available topics to send them to.
Can anyone help with any/all of these? I spent a good deal of time function testing this and all of the sudden, it’s useless.
Can you describe in more detail how you have set this up? What do you mean by private topics?
What do you see when you click on the envelope in the top right corner of posts as in the screenshot? You should be able to see the source email there, including details that will help you with troubleshooting what is going on with their emails. I suspect there’s not going to be alot you can do about it if they are not sending emails with properly formed headers.
I hope I can convince them to just send support requests from their e-mail clients rather than through their ticket system, but I imagine that will be an uphill battle.
What happens when you click on the envelope? Are you an admin of your site? If so you should see a popup like this letting you toggle between raw, text and html versions of the email.
I think we misunderstand each other.. did you see my screenshot two posts up? You should be able to see an “Incoming Email” popup like my screenshot. That will let you see the source.
If the issue is with the sender there isn’t anything we can do about it on the Discourse site. Let me know if we can close this topic.
This text isn’t off topic for this post, I was just restating point 3 from the original post. If you think it would be better asked in a new topic that’s fine, I was just trying not to litter.
This is kind of an important point as for some reason, when one of our clients responds to topics, instead of making a new post, it makes a whole new topic that I cannot merge.
You’re right, I was reading ‘envelope’ but braining ‘edit’. Yes, when I look at the text in the envelope it’s all there. So why is this happening, and how do I fix it in the future?
By default, Discourse tries to hide, for example, signatures and previous messages when you email to a category, as posts to a category are usually public. These parts are removed because they might contain email addresses the user didn’t intend to share with everyone who can read posts in that category.
I think the settings related to that are Trim incoming emails and Always show trimmed content. I remember something about Incoming email prefer HTML too. But I don’t remember exactly how they interact.
For the issue that replies create new topics disabling Find related post with key might help. But as I said, I have no experience with these settings.
Oh, I see you are right it is related after all. In case you didn’t know, when merging messages you can copy the topic ID number from the URL of the message you want to merge into, into the “Existing Message” field. Can you try that and see what happens?
Take a look at the email addresses in the raw tab. They should look something like this:
If instead you are seeing a different email address, eg the one for starting new topics by email in your category, then that is the culprit.
There’s nothing that can be done on the Discourse side to fix that - you’d have to take it up with the people you are communicating with or just live with it and move the replies manually as I suggest above if you want to keep them together.
Yes, ‘trim incoming’ is checked, and ‘always show trimmed’ isn’t, I wonder…
Should I reverse those, or just check the 2nd one to get what I want.
I guess I’ll have to play with them a bit. For the support category it doesn’t matter what’s exposed since the topics are private by default. My guess is that over 99% of the rest of our forum will be interacted with via web.
The warning on this makes me reluctant to disable it.
Worked perfectly, thanks. Now I just need to fix the deprecated code that shows the topic ID on the page. But I’m guessing that IS too far afield from this topic, so I’ll revive my old one to try and get some help there.
Yes, I see that it’s just addressed to the topic’s e-mail rather than having the +key part.
I’ve asked them repeatedly to respond in the chain rather than e-mailing responses directly. I don’t know if they have a weird system on their end or… some other explanation which I might get in trouble for putting in print.
