

Shown HN: Open Source Ticket Desk app - AlexBlom
https://github.com/AlexBlom/TicketDesk

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chris_wot
Have you considered fleshing this out? I have a few ideas about customers I'd
like to try out... I'm interested in forking, but would like to know where you
want to take this.

 _Edit:_ Sorry, I've just realized that I haven't really contributed a lot to
this on HN. Specifically - how does the ticketing system work? What is the
difference between a ticket and an issue? It seems that you can have a ticket
that has many issues, but issues can have many tickets...

Does an issue encapsulate a lot of tickets? If so, is the primary work done on
the ticket or the issue? The reason I ask is how do you allocate the unit of
work to specific people.... or is this not the point of the app?

Sorry in advance for the huge number of questions.

~~~
AlexBlom
Hi. I may flesh it out, but I've also opened up the software. If you have
extension ideas, please feel free to fork / contribute. You can flip me an
e-mail (my first name @ my HN username . com) if you want to go further, or
flip a note on Twitter.

An issue has a one to many relationship with tickets. I built it, as I found
I'd get many tickets about the same thing from different users. I wanted to be
able to focus on solving the macro issue and not manage many issues. Terry
Smith is one of the thinkers behind it.

~~~
chris_wot
I might be missing something here, but in ticket.rb, it has the line:

    
    
      has_many :issue
    

and in issue.rb, it has the line:

    
    
      has_many :ticket
    

Why a M:N mapping of issues to tickets? Were you planning of future expansion?

~~~
AlexBlom
Perhaps I mis-spoke above. An issue can be associated with multiple tickets,
just as a ticket can be associated with multiple issues. The latter is not
beefed as much in the code, as I found the use case to be less once live.

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sandGorgon
I'm using Redmine in a similar setup. Have you seen any performance impact of
rake tasks to pull imap mails ? I'm a little wary of the rake task loading the
entire ruby (in my case Rails) environment, everytime it starts up.

any thoughts ?

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atechie
It depends upon the hardware you have. But if you have a decent machine say
EC2 small instances or something like
<http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq19> it should not be an
issue. We use similar setup for promptcloud and that machine has numerous
other things running too, there is no noticeable load.

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sonicaa
The app looks great. I wanted to point out the following (I might be missing
something here) -- When I'm on the Customers tab, I see 0 open tickets for
Alex B but when I click on Alex B and see his detailed page, I see 4 open
tickets.

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eitally
I like the ease of responding to (posting to work log + emailing submitter) of
a ticket, and except for excessive whitespace the look is pretty attractive,
too.

That said, it is lacking so many critical features any business of significant
size would need to take it seriously, and to be honest, the market is glutted
with good options of all costs and capabilities so I'm curious to know what
your intention was in creating this?

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jakejake
I like the simplicity. I personally really like to have either tags or at
least status field for issues. I know some people just like open/closed but
for our team we have thousands of tickets that pile up so we need to keep them
organized in some way. nice work on the app though!

~~~
AlexBlom
Thanks. It's easy to keep things simple when you are building for my use case,
which was rather basic.

That being said, I see the value of tagging. Perhaps a future addition.

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cmelbye
It looks nice, I like the simplicity. One nit pick: I'm not too fond of the
flash notices. Fading out and then suddenly being removed from the document,
causing all content below it to jump up, is slightly jarring IMHO.

~~~
AlexBlom
Appreciate the feedback. Will see how often this is reported. The fading is
also handled in the main JS file, so you can disable it there.

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Bjoern
Thanks for open sourcing it, great work. Sorry for the stupid question I have
not much experience with this type of app. How do customers create tickets?
I'm not exactly clear of the workflow, could you elaborate?

~~~
AlexBlom
Sure. You create a support e-mail. Customers send to this e-mail, and tickets
are auto-created.

~~~
Bjoern
Thanks for that.

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alance
It's might also be worth checking out allocPSA.com, also open source, and has
a similar ticketing email gateway thingo... and a little tiny bit more
functionality. (I'm very biased though :-)

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superchink
I got “Sorry, this tree is taking too long to generate.”

<http://d.pr/i/uqlG>

Haven't seen this before…

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troels
Since the mail-integration isn't enabled on the demo, I couldn't test it, but
I wonder how well it deals with stuff like signatures, attachments etc.?

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AlexBlom
I'll admit there is not much logic here. Was not needed for my use case. Feel
free to contribute it, though!

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troels
Yeah, I might. I think <https://github.com/github/email_reply_parser> might
come handy here.

~~~
AlexBlom
Good call. Would love to see it integrated.

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veb
This looks great. I really want to get this working and then after a week,
"hey boss, support seems better now huh?"... :-)

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heartbreak
I'd like to see the first text box on a form be automatically selected when
the page loads.

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pearkes
Would be great to see a working demo of some kind, or screenshots!

~~~
AlexBlom
Fair. I've got an EC2 instance booting up right now.

~~~
aymeric
Yes please, it is hard to judge whether this is a good option without
screenshots or demo.

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aymeric
I can't register :( I get a rails error page.

~~~
moeffju
Login with alex@ticketdesk.co / 123456

