Akeeba Ticket System

Wednesday, 24 February 2021 20:12 CST

Hello,

I am have been testing various user scenarios and it seems that when a registered user sends an email ticket, ATS is not using an email templates for notifications to the user or the case manager (see attachment) Also, we have all of our email tickets going to a category called "Uncategorized" with priority set to "normal" and the category is published.

However, the ticket is created originally as "unpublished", nor assigned, "open" status. Then after a short interval (approximately 4 minutes, which is also our mail fetch interval) The ticket is changed and assigned to the default Joomla Super User and the status is set to "Pending". The ticket is left as "unpublished". This behavior is problematic as the ticket will not show up in the Front End for our case managers.

It should be noted that the same user can submit tickets normally via the web front end.

Once again, thank you for your support and the great product. I hate to think of the user tags that have been added to my support account recently. "-)

Much appreciation,

EJ

Edited by on 2021-03-27 20:45 CDT

Thursday, 25 February 2021 02:54 CST

nicholas

ATS will try to find the best match email template based on the email type and language. If no match is found it uses no email template which is what happened with your emails.

If you unpublished or deleted any of the email templates that come with Akeeba Ticket System you need to replace them.

If all your email templates are set to "English (Great Britain)" you may want to set the to "(All)" since the CLI application that fetches the emails might not have a language set up or have a language other than English set up, depending on your site's configuration.

Regarding how the ticket is created, there is no code to create an unpublished ticket. New tickets are created published. Their private or public status depends on how the ticket category is set up. I have not been able to reproduce this at all. Further to that, I am wondering how you got tickets assigned automatically if not by using the automatic ticket reply feature. I need some more info about whether you are using any such features so I can make a test setup to understand better what you are seeing.

PS: No user tags have been assigned to you. You are not asking anything irrational and you're not rude to us. We appreciate it, especially since we've been the bearers of bad news more than once! I do understand your use case; I've read all your tickets. I honest believe it's a large architectural departure from the core assumptions of a generic ticket system i.e. one owner for the lifetime of a ticket, one responsible (assigned) support staff at any given time, only the owner and any support staff member can reply to the ticket. What you need is something I have seen, just not in any off-the-shelf helpdesk software or SaaS. I've only seen that in bespoke helpdesk implementations and some specialised software for financial institutions. You need to either go for a bespoke application or make concessions with regards to your requirements. We can help by telling you what's possible and what's not but we can't make deep architectural changes to ATS to support a very niche use case in what already is a niche product in our extensions portfolio. I hope that makes sense.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 25 February 2021 09:23 CST

[email protected]

Nicolas,

Thanks for the detailed response and patience.

I have resolved most of the issues I reported using the information you provided:

1.) (Fixed) Email originated tickets were not using any of the "known" or configured templates and missing information.

Based on your explanation, I realized that I had changed the default language in Joomla to "English-US" and set the email templates to use "English-US". After changing the templates to use "All", the email submitted tickets are now back to displaying properly.

2.) After a short interval, I suspect as a result of the next mailfetch operation, Email originated tickets were:

a. Auto Assigned to a Specific User (resolved)

b. A null/blank reply was added to the ticket (resolved)

c. An email notification was sent to the ticket owner with the null/blank reply (resolved)

d. The ticket was changed to "unpublished"

The first three issues were resolved by changing the email address of the default Joomla "Super User". It was configured with the same email address that is being used for incoming email tickets. This address is also the same used in the Joomla Global Configuration>Server>Mail Settings.

I am still investigating the last issue, as the tickets are still being changed automatically to "unpublished" after a short interval. The category that I specified for email tickets is called "Uncategorized" Access:Registered, Language:All.

Any pointers or thoughts would be appreciated.

Thank you,

EJ

Thursday, 25 February 2021 12:20 CST

nicholas

The first three issues were resolved by changing the email address of the default Joomla "Super User". It was configured with the same email address that is being used for incoming email tickets. This address is also the same used in the Joomla Global Configuration>Server>Mail Settings.

Yup, that makes sense. It's a good idea to have a different mail address for the site and the ticket system. Otherwise you get the ticket system talking to itself.

Let's say your site uses address A for itself, the ticket system and the default Super User. Here's what will happen.

The client sends an email to the ticket system, i.e. at address A. This is read by the mail fetch and creates a ticket. It also sends an email to all managers. This includes the address of the Super User which is the same email address A.

The email has a reply line that references the ticket ID. The next time the mail fetch runs it sees that email. Does it have a reply line? Check: it's a reply to a ticket. Does it belong to a known user? Check: it belongs to Super User. Does the user has reply rights to the ticket? Check: the Super User is a de factor ticket manager. Therefore it takes the text above the reply line (i.e. nothing) and submits it as a reply to the ticket.

Now two things happen. A ticket manager just replied to a new ticket so they are auto-assigned the ticket. This explains why all tickets are assigned to the Super User.

Since a reply is filed to a ticket assigned to a manager no manager gets emailed. The user who filed the ticket, however, is sent an email being told that the ticket received a blank reply.

I am still investigating the last issue, as the tickets are still being changed automatically to "unpublished" after a short interval.

This is really weird. The email fetch only has code to publish items, nothing to unpublish new or existing tickets / posts.

Both automatic replies and instant replies on mail fetch only submits posts, it doesn't change the ticket publish status. Even the auto-close CRON task will close a ticket, it won't unpublish it. The only two ways to unpublish a ticket are by manual action through the front- or backend when you are a ticket manager. Since these actions are behind a login and do ACL checks they won't be triggered by something crawling the page.

Therefore, unless you have set up the guest user as a ticket manager I don't see how that could happen.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 25 February 2021 12:49 CST

[email protected]

Nicolas,

I have attached a screenshot of the "Guest" permissions from Akeeba Tickets Options.

At this point, email tickets are unusable and this is a must have feature for our production rollout.

1.) In a previous ticket I was instructed to download a developer version of the software to fix an Error message when users would attempt to submit a ticket without selecting a category. Could there possibly be legacy components from that build causing the issue? Should I re-install the latest published build? If so, can I just upload and install, or are there other steps I should take?

2.) Is it worth re-installing ATS on a fresh Joomla build to see if I get the same errors?

#2 would be a lot of work if it fixes the unpublished error, as I would have to manually restore the current site content.

Thanks in advance for your help in figuring this out.

Eric

Edited by on 2021-03-27 20:45 CDT

Thursday, 25 February 2021 21:18 CST

[email protected]

Nicolas,

Thank you for your explanations of how the mail fetch cli works. It has been very helpful. After more testing, it seems that the email origin tickets are now working as expected. I was not seeing some of the tickets in the front end and mistaking that as the ticket being "unpublished". There was also some confusion on my part between the mailfetch interval and refresh interval on the test mail client and the ticket mailbox client.

Your patience as always is greatly appreciated. I will close the case.

Thank you,

EJ

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