Looks like I misunderstood the functionality in the official Discourse Assign plugin when Angus and I started working on this plugin.
As discussed elsewhere, the assigned plugin is meant to be used to assign topics that need attention. Topics are then unassigned again when whatever the task is has been completed. Meanwhile, we designed the tickets plugin around the idea that tickets remain forever assigned even once it has been resolved, so we can follow up and help desk team colleagues who are allowing tickets to languish.
The assigned plugin has been improved recently with a new daily/weekly or monthly reminder message and improvements to the assigned activity page. With these improvements, it’s more obvious how it is intended to be used.
Now that I understand it better, I think the assigned plugin gets it right and will start going through tickets on my system and unassigning those that do not need handling or that are resolved.
The new flow, I think, will be:
- new tickets are not always assigned
- tickets are assigned when followup is needed
- once an assigned ticket is resolved, it is unassigned again
- if someone replies or wants to reopen it, we reassign it
When someone leaves the team, one of the following happens:
- they resolve and unassign their remaining tickets
- they reassign their remaining tickets to someone else
- an admin unassigns all their tasks or reassigns them to someone else
Two things come to mind that need some thought here:
- @angus: the dashboard, when overhauled, will want to show (and be filterable by) people who were involved in a ticket… for various reasons… because it is about them, was started by them or contains replies by them, or was assigned to them at some point. The simplest way to handle this methinks would be to not try to distinguish between these various reasons and just list them together just like on the messages.
- when a colleague leaves the team and is removed from the helpdeskteam group, they still have access to the messages they wrote or were involved in while they were in the group. This is a bit weird, though in practice it hasn’t been an issue so far. I guess if we have a problematic break with a colleague, which thankfully has never happened, we can anonymize their account when they leave.