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All my support tickets are still publicly available!

Hello,

please mark ALL support-tickets that I have ever posted here as private! You can leave this one open, because I wonder about how other members feel about this:

It's pretty annoying to me that you don't preset support-tickets as "private" or least "only visible for members". It's bad that you don't explicitely warn ticket-submitters that the ticket will be visible to everybody, not just members, even crawlable by Google, by default!

This forces us to opt into privacy for these tickets, instead of set them as private by default. I admit that sometimes simply forget about this preset. But I shouldn't opt-out of being publicly exposed with my business-related issues (such as support-tickets that relate to my clients sites!). This should be set as a standard, from my own point of view and if I'd ask my clients, very probably from theirs too.

However: Please respect your members privacy in the area of support-tickets. Here's how you could easily do it:

– Set new Support-Tickets as private by default

– Add a Checkbox "This ticket is set to private. If you want to set it to public pls check this*"

and then something like

"* public tickets can be read by other members and so you could potentially receive more help from other members and not only support-staff. At the same time, if this icket gets resolved and others find it, they may benefit from your solution."

Honestly, I never found helpful content when checking support-forum-tickets for issues that i have been facing. Maybe because an existing resolution was marked as private #irony

So I usually need to fire a new support -request anyway and usually I need to mark it private afterwards, because my clients don't want to find they website on Google as part of a public support-discussion. Could be bad for their reputation. So I'm not only begging you provide more respect to my personal privacy concerns, but also to my clients privacy.

I wonder how other members feel about this. I hope the wording used here is not perceived as too harsh or inappropriate (pls forgive my low english skills). Others than this ticket may tell, I really really enjoy my WPMUDEV membership, the community and services provided here.

Have a lovely day,

Sascha

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:32:06
  • Predrag Dubajic
    • Support

    Hi Sascha,

    Sorry to hear that you're so unsatisfied with this, but this is how it always worked and when opening a new ticket there's a message on ticket form that the tickets are public after posting:

    [attachments are only viewable by logged-in members]

    Ticket form also comes with a site field and the address provided there is only available to our staff and is not available for other members or visitors that are checking the ticket so this information is safe and will not be indexed by search engines.

    We have thousands of tickets open on our forums ranging from all kinds of issues, not just about our products but general WP questions as well so many people find it useful and are able to resolve their issues with the already provided information.

    If the members are asking to mark their tickets as private we don't have problems with doing that but we would usually like to know the reason, so I would like to ask if you have some specific tickets where the information you shared shouldn't be publicly available and we can either set them as private or simply mask the information you don't want to be publicly available?

    As you already know we also introduced live chat for quite some time ago and information provided in there is not public and if a ticket is opened for you by our staff from chat any sensitive data will be masked and you can ask the staff to mark your ticket as private when opening it.

    We don't have an option to mask all of your tickets as private at once so it would be best if you could share the tickets you want to be set as private or have some information masked/removed and we will do this for you.

    Best regards,

    Predrag

  • sascha
    • Code Wrangler

    Hey Predag, thank you for your detailed explanation.

    I know about the value that a ticket may have for the community. I know about live-chat and sometimes use it. Sometimes tickets are more convenient and more indepth if needed though …

    I just disagree about each new ticket being public by default, so actually you force members to actively “opt out”. This is as in Europe we have GDPR now and it helped me become more aware about how I’m handling my clients assets, such as their websites-issues being discussed in a public forum without their consent. It’s very inconvenient to process new tickets like this:

    1. Open Ticket and requesting privacy

    2. Waiting for the new ticket-status

    3. Start with explaining the issue

    Why not set tickets to “private” by default and add a checkbox or button, that we can use to explicitly allow the ticket to become visibel to everyone?

    […] we can either set them as private or simply mask the information you don’t want to be publicly available?

    I didn’t know that you’re able to mask specific parts of a ticket private. Is it possible to keep a ticket public and set all the client-related informations such as domain-names or -directories, so that only I can see these information, but the public will see something like

    “Hey, I have an issue on my clients website under [DOMAIN]”

    ?

    If that’s the case, I wish you could make this a standard setting and I will never worry about leaving tickets public :wink:

    Thank you and kind regards,

    Sascha

  • Predrag Dubajic
    • Support

    Hi Sascha,

    Thanks for the additional info, I do understand your point, I don't think we have any plans on making such change but I'll pass it over to our management team for further discussion :slight_smile:

    I didn't know that you're able to mask specific parts of a ticket private. Is it possible to keep a ticket public and set all the client-related informations such as domain-names or -directories, so that only I can see these information, but the public will see something like

    I think there was misunderstanding here, sorry about that, I wanted to say that we can mask the URLs in tickets (manually) and change them from, for example, domain.com to do****.com

    We can get the site information if you selected site in question when you opened your ticket, I'm referring to this field:

    [attachments are only viewable by logged-in members]

    Domain selected there is not visible to anyone but the staff and is not visible by search engines either.

    So you can just say what the issue is and there's no need to mention the domain in your ticket content, as we will see which domain is related to your ticket and will check your question there.

    Even if you have multisite installation you can just add site ID in the ticket instead of sharing full subsite URL.

    There's also Message field in WPMU DEV > Support page when you're granting access to your site so any additional information, that you don't want to show in the ticket, can be added there.

    Best regards,

    Predrag