[rt-users] How to deal with people reopening old tickets

[John Arends]

We have 2 problems that I would classify as lying somewhere between 
being technology problems and user education. I have a few ideas but I'm 
curious to hear how others have dealt with these issues.

1. How do you deal with thank you messages? We resolve a ticket, and get 
a reply that says 'thanks' which then re-opens the ticket.

2. How do you deal with users who use an old email as their 'entry 
point' into your ticketing system? This happens where a user keeps an 
old email around, and keeps replying to it. So you might have a ticket 
from 6 months ago that refers to a printer installation, and the person 
just replies to it and says 'oh my internet is slow now'

The problem is that since these replies don't go through the proper work 
flow, staff may not see them and the issue won't be handled appropriately.


So we have discussed a few options. One option is definitely user 
education. Another might be to not allow resolved tickets to be reopened 
through replies. We could outright reject new text appended to them and 
send a message that the user should create a new ticket as one example.

I'm curious to see what others are doing as we try to explore our options.

-John