Tickets Plugin 🎟

Awesome! So glad to see this ticket plugin become a reality. Angus has done some terrific work here, and has been very patient with my feature requests and feedback. He deserves a medal. :1st_place_medal:

I hope more communities decide to use this plugin, and help to make it even better by contributing use cases, feedback and code. I am also hoping to see some improvements to other discourse features to make tickets even more awesome.

We’ve been using it on our site for a few weeks already and it works well, though I have yet to properly roll it out to my team. As that happens I’ll be able to give more feedback on what’s working and what needs improvements from our point of view.

For right now, here’s my wish list:

  • improved functionality on topic and message lists for selecting and bulk updating, to e.g. change category, add/remove tags, create ticket, mark solved, open/close, reassign, change priority, change status, etc. (discussed elsewhere)
  • solved plugin: Allow staff to select OP to be solution, if no replies.
  • solved plugin: Prevent staff from selecting whispered replies as solution, as risks exposing private conversation. (discussed elsewhere)
  • “ticket system heath” statistics, e.g. number of tickets by status, time to completion, ratio of tickets by status, charts showing above over time. Not sure where this should live - is the dashboard extendable through plugins?
  • automatic ticket updates when reply is sent (e.g. change status tag to waiting/underway, add reminder for assignee with interval based on priority, etc)
  • automatic assignee based on ticket reason
  • automatic tickets based on group or group email
  • automatic solved/unsolved based on ticket status
  • default filters and options on dashboard to more quickly see only tickets assigned to me, or only open tickets etc.
  • not directly related but a common ticket task for our helpdesk: UI method for merging users, with ability to choose which email address is primary and which is secondary. (discussed elsewhere)

In case you’re wondering, here are some notes on the api method we use for creating tickets. We use it to create a new ticket for each new member as they join, for the purposes of onboarding and welcoming them, and when reaching out to members for feedback when they download resources from our resource library. We also use it when inviting lists of people (e.g. event attendees) to join the network, instead of email.

  • is_ticket = 1
  • tags[] = tag1 each on a separate line, use ticket tags and any additional tags to help find messages later (note square brackets - required!)
  • target_usernames = should always contain helpdesk group accessible to the staff in charge of ticket follow-up. Can contain an email address instead of username to create staged users (handy for sending bulk invites and making them tickets for follow-up)
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