
Show HN: Deskulu – Opensource knowledgebase and ticketing system - farhadhf
https://github.com/taskulu/deskulu
======
reitanqild
Nice work and thanks for sharing! And don't care about the PHP haters here.

For those who wants to go with hosted anyway, I'd recommend looking into
Freshdesk instead of Zendesk.

Some reasons:

* Free tier up to three users

* Cheaper licenses once you leave the free tier. (IIRC)

* More features included by default in the free and lowest tiers. (IIRC)

Just be aware that a friendly Indian (or so I think) will call to try to
upsell you : )

~~~
darkvertex
We use Freshdesk's "FreshService" ticket system at my workplace and the way it
handles replies in one ticket from non-agents is absolute garbage.

You make a ticket by email, it adds to the system, a support agent is assigned
to it, so far so good... then a developer with access to see the ticket goes
to the ticket page and adds a helpful reply, except the ticket creator never
hears about it. It's registered on the ticket web UI, but the creator of the
ticket is ONLY notified of the responses by the support agent only. This sucks
big time (and AFAIK is not configurable.)

Also god forbid someone uses email (or an email alias you're part of) to make
the ticket and you accidentally do Reply All so your reply creates a brand new
ticket just for you as opposed to appearing as a response in the initial
ticket. It's so dumb. (You can get a ticket ID to put in a brand new email and
then your reply would be registered but you need to know the ticket number
first AND it still suffers the same issue that if you are not the support
agent your reply is registered but never notified to the ticket creator.)

If your support is always 1-to-1 then by all means Freshservice is fine,
though.

~~~
vijayfreshdesk
Hi Darkvertex. Sorry you had this experience with FS, but I blv you might have
missed out some of the configurations in FS, which is why you feel the
confusion. First off all, we dont block or restrict the developers from
replying. While replying to the ticket, all you need to do is, toggle the
option - Private/Public comment. For email replies this is very much
configurable from your Admin > Observer rule. Create a rule to add a Public
Note instead of a Private Note. If the reply is going to be via Email. If its
going to be via the Ticket page itself, use the toggle below and change the
reply to public. As for your 2nd point, we dont recommend using Alias emails
because distribution list as Support or Helpdesk Email is a wrong method and
has no accountability and hence we suggest using a proper support mailbox.
This has been clearly mentioned in our Solution articles too, when you setup
the Support mailbox. We suggest using a proper mailbox and use it in the
system. Its just you need to setup the product in right manner, which will
help you achieve you Support/Helpdesk model in the right way. If you need any
assistance, we are more than happy to assist you

Thanks Vijay Freshservice Support

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SwellJoe
Our current ticket tracker is Project Issue (the same one used by Drupal.org,
sort of, though they seem to still be running a custom version). I dislike it
a _lot_ , and it was a tremendous pain in the ass to migrate from the Drupal 6
version to the Drupal 7 version. I'm hesitant to invest any more time in
Drupal-based solutions to things because of how painful our D6 to D7 migration
has been and how buggy and incomplete almost every module we use has been.
(And, with most developers now focusing on Drupal 8, I don't expect any of
these problems to ever get fixed in Drupal 7.)

But, this looks really nice, and since I'm stuck with Drupal for the
foreseeable future (I can't afford to stop everything to do another migration
at this point), I will likely look into how difficult migrating our tickets
from Project Issue would be. I don't suppose there's already a migration for
that?

Also, using a third party for notifications as you're doing is problematic;
probably even a deal breaker, for us. Though, I understand the desire to not
use Drupal notifications, as they're among the most broken parts of the system
and have a clumsy API and very weak solutions to common things like bounce
processing and mailed replies.

Finally, I'm super impressed by how fast some experienced Drupal folks can
whip something up. I struggle for days or weeks to do _anything_ with it. It's
such a large system, and it always seems to take so much code to do even basic
stuff (and forms API in Drupal is deeply ugly and verbose). That's my
roundabout away of congratulating you for making something awesome in a very
short amount of time.

Edit: You mention forums as a feature of this. Is that the standard Drupal
forum module or something else?

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codegeek
"Need a Mandrill account"

You may want to rethink this one as Mandrill screwed their customers big time
recently. So I hope there is a way to add other services like sendgrid,
mailgun etc.

~~~
mfkp
I second this, I recently switched my apps off of Mandrill because of their
changes.

I assume the authors didn't want to deal with the different "incoming
webhooks" from different services, but it shouldn't be too hard to implement
in theory.

For reference, here's a list of SMTP providers which support inbound email:
[https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-
email-s...](https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-
services-the-best-alternatives-to-mandrill/#summary)

~~~
hobofan
Does anyone know if they are trying to kill off Mandrill?

Shortly after they closed down the Mandrill login they closed down our account
for a TOS violation without warning. Outbound emails immediately stopped
sending and we had to switch to Sendgrid ASAP. Their support didn't cave one
bit and it seemed like they were actively trying to lose us as customers.

~~~
1123581321
Can you share what you were doing, and what they thought you were doing?

Do you also use Mailchimp to send marketing emails?

~~~
hobofan
We had our main account which we used to send both marketing mails via
MailChimp and transactional mails via SendGrid. There also was a old account
that was used by a different department for partner newsletters, which was
already inactive for a few months.

They disabled the account, which we only noticed because emails stopped
sending, and their UI also didn't give any explanaition. We asked their
support, they said the second account was a violation of the TOS. We explained
the situation and they still insisted on keeping the account closed.

Now we are with Sendgrid and are spending much less on mails, but I'd rather
have lived without spending the night restoring email functionality.

~~~
codegeek
Don't bother with Mandrill. They clearly don't want to keep their
transactional email customers and perhaps just want to focus on the marketing
piece. After the way they handled mandrill, I wouldn't trust them anyway (and
I was a paying client of mandrill). Go with Sendgrid, mailgun etc. for
transactional emails.

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cyphar
+1 for GPLv2. Would you consider making it "GPLv2 or later", as well as
including the three-paragraph statement of the license in all of the source
files?

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ocdtrekkie
Any reason this shouldn't have straight up SMTP support built in? Was looking
at an internal use for this right up until I noticed that requirement.

~~~
farhadhf
Simply because we were using Mandrill at the time of writing this. It's easy
to add more methods like SMTP/SendGrid/etc to it though.

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sarreph
Great work! With such high per-agent pricing tiers on mainstream platforms
such as osTicket and ZenDesk, this looks like a great alternative for startups
and small teams :)

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xxdesmus
You lost me at: "Deskulu is an opensource helpdesk and ticketing system based
on Drupal 7..."

~~~
farhadhf
I know Drupal is not the best or simplest thing for doing this out there. It's
not even that good in terms of performance. But it's flexible and extremely
fast when it comes to development time. Deskulu was not supposed to be
scalable (it's not going to be Zendesk). I built the first version this over a
weekend to handle our own tickets and then it's just been doing bug
fixes/updates every now and then. It would've been impossible to do it in such
short time with anything else (at least for me), and it's saved us hundreds of
dollars over the past months. I'd call that a win.

~~~
the_ancient
Yes but it is not written in nodejs/rust/<insert lang of the moment> so
clearly it is crap /s

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mahdiponline
Awesome. Thank you.

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behnamakradi
Good

