Support Tickets

Users open a ticket when something on the hub goes wrong and neither Questions and Answers nor the Knowledge Base answers it. Administrators work those tickets in the Support component. This page is about handling the queue day to day; for setting the component up — categories, canned messages, statuses, and who may see what — read Support.

Every hub that has users has a support queue, whether or not anybody watches it. The queue is where a hub finds out what is broken, and a manager who reads it once a week knows more about their hub than one who reads the logs. Half the tickets on a busy hub are the same three problems, which is what the knowledge base and the canned Messages are for.

The one rule worth stating first: reply before you diagnose. An acknowledgement costs a minute and stops the user opening a second ticket, or mailing you directly, or deciding the hub is unmaintained.

The screens

Components → Support opens the ticket list. The submenu carries the rest:

Entry	What it is
Tickets	The queue
Categories	Ticket categories
Queries	Saved, sortable ticket searches built with the query builder
Messages	Canned replies
Statuses	The status vocabulary this hub uses
Abuse	Reports of abusive content from around the site
Stats	Ticket volume and resolution reporting
ACL	Per-role access to the component

What a ticket carries

A ticket is not typed as an issue, a request, or a question — the component has no such field. What it does have:

Field	Values
Severity	critical, major, normal, minor
Status	Whatever the Statuses screen defines, plus the built-in open and closed
Owner	The administrator the ticket is assigned to
Category	From the Categories screen
Target date	Optional due date
Tags	Free tagging

Status is configurable rather than fixed. Each entry on the Statuses screen has a title, an alias, and a flag saying whether it counts as open or closed, so a hub can run new → in progress → waiting on user → resolved while the component still knows which of those mean the ticket is live.

The list's own filters accept status:open, status:closed, status:new, status:waiting, and status:all, alongside owner:, reportedby:, severity:, and a bare search term. owner:me and owner:none resolve to the current administrator and to unassigned.

Working a ticket

Reply first, then diagnose. A short acknowledgement tells the user the ticket landed somewhere, and it costs nothing.

Three questions decide whether a ticket is workable. If the user did not answer them, ask; if you can infer the answers, write them into a comment so the next person does not have to:

1. What was the user trying to do?
2. What did they expect to happen?
3. What actually happened?

For the ticket above: the user searched the forum for "test"; expected a results page; got a 500 error, with a screenshot attached.

Each comment you add carries its own controls — the status, severity, and target date to set alongside it, whether to change the owner, and who gets emailed (submitter, owner, and any CC addresses). Tick Private to keep a comment internal. Attachments go on the comment, not the ticket. The ticket itself has a Group field that restricts the whole ticket to one group.

Assign the ticket once you understand it. An unassigned ticket is nobody's work.

Abuse reports

Carry on the scenario from Approving Content: the hub has been named in a paper, traffic is up, and along with the genuine submissions come the first spam posts. Members flag them, and the flags land here.

The Abuse screen collects reports raised from around the site — forum and blog comments, knowledge base articles, questions, wiki comments. The reporter supplies a reason; the report lands with a status of New.

Open a report to see the reported item in place, then take one action:

Action	Effect
Release item	The report is dismissed and the content stays
Remove as Spam	The content is deleted and fed to the antispam plugins as a training sample
Delete item	The content is deleted
Decide later	Nothing changes; the report stays outstanding

Prefer Remove as Spam over Delete item for actual spam: it does the same removal and additionally hands the text to the antispam plugins as a training sample, so the next post like it is more likely to be caught before a member has to report it. Use Delete item for content that is simply unacceptable rather than spam — training the filter on it would teach it the wrong thing.

The list filters by Outstanding, Released, and Deleted. The Spam Check screen under the same controller lets you paste sample content and see what the enabled antispam plugins make of it — useful when a member complains that a legitimate post was blocked, since it shows you which detector objected. Spam covers the plugins themselves.