Tickets Plugin 🎟

[neemiasvf (Neemias Freitas)]

I’m having exactly the same issue. I’m not sure why. I’ve done everything correctly.

[Kankuro]

It seems to be broken, I’ve disabled it until there is an update.

[tobiaseigen]

@Kankuro

It seems to be broken, I’ve disabled it until there is an update.

It’s not broken at all. We use it every day in our community, and it is working as currently described in the OP.

Granted, it’s an early version of the plugin and there are some improvements I’d like to see too. It would be fantabulous if some others in the community stepped up to sponsor @angus to work on it or to contribute features.

Mainly I am missing bulk ticket management tools, the ability to search tickets by keyword, an indication of which member a ticket is about, and features for monitoring “ticket system health”. There are some issues with pagination and filter on the dashboard, but it works.

Of the issues described by @Kankuro…

@Kankuro

The redirect to the ticket dashboard doesn’t seem to follow caps cases; it takes me to admin/tickets?filters=assigned%3Akankuro instead of admin/tickets?filters=assigned%3AKankuro which results in no tickets being shown.

I don’t have this issue - see screenshot of dashboard filtering by tickets assigned to MohammedAman in my community. I arrived here by clicking on a ticket. I notice your URL has %3A while mine has :. Not sure what’s going on in your site. Maybe a conflict with another plugin? Can you give more detail on where you get this?

@Kankuro

• The tags don’t stick for any of the fields after refreshing or changing pages.

I’ve also noticed that the interface for managing ticket tags, assignee and (for PMs that are tickets) people in the message does not cause the tags, assignee and people in message to immediately show up - this is behavior that @angus and I talked about and we decided it was low priority. But they do show up upon refresh or leaving/coming back to the ticket.

@Kankuro

• I’m not getting any sort of PM or notification to tell when there is a new ticket, not sure if this is intentional or if there is supposed to be some sort of alert to let people know when they have a new ticket.

This is normal and by design. Unless a ticket is assigned to you, you will not get a notification.

Typically our workflow is to whisper to the assignee when we create a ticket with further instructions if needed… the assignee then gets a whisper for that.

[Kankuro]

None of what you described is working for me, so I’m not sure.

[tobiaseigen]

ok - happy to help but need more information from you.

just keep in mind that the plugin is not broken.

[Kankuro]

@tobiaseigen

ok - happy to help but need more information from you.

What information exactly?

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Hey there @Kankuro and @neemiasvf , thanks for trying out the plugin.

When you say it’s “broken”, do you mean it’s not working at all, or this specific list of items are not working for you?

@Kankuro

• The redirect to the ticket dashboard doesn’t seem to follow caps cases; it takes me to admin/tickets?filters=assigned%3Akankuro instead of admin/tickets?filters=assigned%3AKankuro which results in no tickets being shown.
• The tags don’t stick for any of the fields after refreshing or changing pages.
• I’m not getting any sort of PM or notification to tell when there is a new ticket, not sure if this is intentional or if there is supposed to be some sort of alert to let people know when they have a new ticket.

[neemiasvf (Neemias Freitas)]

Hey @angus,

I just figured out. I was being plain dumb, nothing more. I had one of my categories configured to only allow tagging from a certain group, and the tickets group was not included. As soon as I changed that, everything worked like a charm. Yes, I feel ashamed and I’m sorry I had put you through this and wasted your time.

Thanks

[Kankuro]

Just the list of items seem to be the problem. The biggest issue is the redirect not accounting for caps and the tags not sticking. Because the tags don’t stick, it doesn’t actually assign any tickets.

[gpetrov (George Petrov)]

@tobiaseigen

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)

This is definitely a good list to have!

We would like also to have to tickets public @angus - as most people just post bugs in a special bugs category that needs to become tickets, or result in tickets and people should be able to see that status

Thanks for making this plugin!

[gerald]

Hi,

Could you explain what this plugin does? I was hoping for a ticketing system in which regular users seeking for help from the staff could open a “support ticket”.
However, after installing the plugin, I log is as regular user and I don’t see any option to create a ticket.

[tobiaseigen]

Hi there,

As of now, only staff can create tickets, or turn any message or topic into a ticket.

We use the api to create tickets when various things happen, via our wordpress site. I guess you could create a form externally that uses the api to create tickets in the same way.

@angus is this a feature that would be pr welcome? To provide a direct way for non staff users to create tickets?

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

@tobiaseigen

To provide a direct way for non staff users to create tickets?

Yes, this should definitely be on the agenda. It would increase the scope of the use cases substantially. @tobiaseigen Could you assimilate the various pieces of feedback into a prioritised to do list with max 3 items on it?

[tobiaseigen]

Hi Angus!

I may be right, but I don’t think there’s much new feedback from others here. @WorldIsMine has suggested creating “ticket health” functionality which would be very handy to have and we would definitely use it if it existsed, but there are more important tasks.

If I were you, I’d work on these three tasks next to make the ticket system more stable and usable.

1. bug: The hijacked link to a user’s assigned tickets appears to not work for usernames that have mixed case.
2. add ability to indicate the user a ticket is about. Add column on tickets dashboard for date ticket was created and date created, date of last activity. (ok, I see I may have snuck in some separate tasks here - so sue me )
3. hijack search on tickets dashboard to allow searching for tickets by keyword

Note: @Kankuro had reported 1 above but I didn’t understand it previously. Now I was able to replicate it.

click for replicable steps on namati

Steps to replicate:

go to your own messages, then click on ASSIGNED on the menu. You will see it works!

go to Mohammed’s messages, then click on ASSIGNED on the menu. It does not work! Note lower-case on URL:

https://community.namati.org/admin/tickets?filters=assigned%3Amohammedaman

click link to Mohammed’s assigned tasks on the dashboard - it works! Note case on URL:

https://community.namati.org/admin/tickets?filters=assigned%3AMohammedAman

If you wanted to add a feature to allow non staff to create tickets, I think it would make sense to do it after the above is in place. It doesn’t seem as pressing to me because it is possible to do just this using an external form and the API. The only thing missing now is that users can’t see the ticket status, priority and reason, or assigned. But that is less important in my view.

I don’t know exactly how it might look but we should talk through it and solicit ideas. Maybe the easiest thing is to add a group setting to enable tickets for the group. Then when enabled, a TICKET button shows up on the user card pop up and group landing page. (A URL method for starting a ticket would be provided, like we have for starting a message, so on other parts of our site we could write something like “start a ticket by clicking here” or whatever.) When selected, an interface pops up that looks much like the current add ticket interface, already enabled and including the group and perhaps with some default ticket tags already prefilled. To see and manage their tickets, users could get a TICKETS menu option on their messages to access their own tickets? Or the dashboard could be moved to the /tickets route and only show people the tickets they have access to?

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Thanks that’s useful.

@tobiaseigen

I don’t know exactly how it might look but we should talk through it and solicit ideas. Maybe the easiest thing is to add a group setting to enable tickets for the group.

Interesting.

I was thinking of hooking this plugin in with Quick Messages, so you could have a “Help” button in the bottom right that would open a chat with support staff and also automatically create a ticket, intercom style.

Open to anyone’s thoughts on how to best implement user-created tickets.

[tobiaseigen]

@angus

I was thinking of hooking this plugin in with Quick Messages

I love this idea. I guess it could be in quick messages and on group usercard and page. wouldn’t have to exclude each other. People could also put a Submit Support Ticket wherever they want - eg on their main custom nav, hamburger menu or discourse link next to LATEST etc.

One issue that I can foresee is that for sites that use tickets in multiple ways you will want to have some ticket tags that are not shown to users. So maybe you want to set up at least another “reason” tag group for public tickets. But maybe some people will even want to allow their members to set status and priority.

I can see this ballooning so would very much hope we can resolve the things I listed above first before we start on them. There are even other tasks that I think are more important, like revamping the tickets dashboard filtering/sorting/pagination. Including default filters and options on dashboard to quickly see only tickets assigned to me or only open tickets.

Good times!

[FoohonPie]

Hey, great plugin! It’s helping my staff organize a ton of tasks, and keeping them accountable without forcing them onto an external tool.

I unfortunately am having the same casing issue though. In my situation, going to my own user’s messages does not work, as in the steps you mentioned to replicate. I always get linked to the lowercase version of my name, i_like_pie, instead of the properly cased I_like_pie.

It seems as though the tickets view is case sensitive on names, where the discourse messages view isn’t.

[FoohonPie]

Hey, I just un-installed this and wanted to provide some feedback.

It was initially great, and I still think it’s a great plugin, but it ended up not working for us. Our staff of 6 tested it pretty aggressively for just over 3 weeks. We went through about 75 tickets overall, and decided that it just wouldn’t scale well for us.

That’s not to say that it won’t work for others; it might. Here’s what we found though in case it’s useful:

Assignment Woes

As recommended, we used this plugin alongside Discourse Assign. The pairing makes great sense.

However, we quickly discovered that it fell short of our needs to view multiple staff members being involved in a single deliverable. This is obviously not the Tickets Plugin’s fault, but it did effect our usage of it. There’s debate on whether or not a task should have more than one assignee vs a single owner, but our situation didn’t allow for compromise on this matter.

Our workaround was to create a new “ticket-topic” for each task, thats only purpose was to point to a unified discussion topic. This worked well enough at first, but even for a small staff of 6 this quickly grew out of control. We even set up a sub-category just for these new tickets, which did help a bit, but not enough.

A good example of how absurd this became is that when a community member reports an issue (PM topic 1) that requires our attention, we create a new staff-only discussion (topic 2) that points to topic 1 so that we can discuss privately. Whispers unfortunately don’t help us much here, for unrelated reasons.

Then, as this new topic requires multiple assignees, we create new tickets (topic 3 - up to topic 8) so that relevant staff members can be notified and their distinct ticket statuses can be monitored.

All this for a single issue.

Integration was both good and bad

Given the above, all the various ticket notifications quickly became noisy enough that it reduced the general usefulness of notifications as a whole.

Our other issue was that, especially given our workaround leading to duplicate ticket-topics, the “Latest” views within the forum quickly suffered from self-inflicted spam and also became fairly useless. We tried to use tickets as group PMs to get around this, but then they wouldn’t show up in the tickets view, so we stuck to regular topics.

Unfortunately, our primary reason for wanting tickets within Discourse in the first place ended up being the reason we changed our minds; it became overly present. In the end I am reminded that Discourse is built for discussion, and conceptually, bringing tickets in as literal topics breaks this model.

In other words, of course Discourse thinks every time we create a ticket that we also want to have a conversation. Why wouldn’t it? It has no reason to care that a ticket might not necessarily warrant a larger discussion.

Other minor issues

The tickets view itself was also broken for us, in that using a url that combined different options (for example, to-do sorted by owner) would intermittently negate any options, giving us a list of all tickets. Our solution was to just use a single “to do” filter and re-do whatever other options we wanted if we felt compelled to.

Speaking of the tickets view, it was generally very useful but we also did realize that there’s no way to express the effort that tickets require, which is important for us to evaluate how much work is being done as not all tickets are equal in scope. We need this to both plan upcoming work and to assess staff efficiency.

There’s also the issue I mentioned in my post above about case sensitivity breaking individual staff members’ personal ticket views.

None of these by themselves are outright horrible, but given our overall experience it made it further difficult to argue to keep using this plugin in place of an external purpose-built tool.

We did end up moving to such a tool, and although I really wanted to keep using this plugin, I couldn’t form a good enough argument for it given everything above.

---

I appreciate all the work involved here! Please don’t take any of the above personally, I’m just providing my own experience in case others in my shoes later on find it helpful.

I would still recommend this plugin for those who don’t need multiple assignees on a ticket, and aren’t concerned with visualizing effort.

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Thanks for such a detailed rundown! I’ll reply in more detail soon.

[Juno]

Nevermind I just noticed you have to add tags to the tag groups created by this plugin. Totally missed that.

I’m checking this out now but can’t get the ticket tagging to work. When I edit a post the three dropdowns (priority, status and reason) are empty. Can’t select anything.

Is there a setting I’m getting wrong somewhere? I have both ticketing, tagging and assigning turned on. I can tag posts normally just fine.