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

[King, Aubrey]

Number one is always a headache.

Number 2 could be resolved w/ a procmail recipe or such.  If you don't
use the rt cli tools, you should.  I say this because you could config
procmail to check the date on a case before it hits the mailgate.  If
date is too old (3 months?), then it mails the person back telling them
how to open a new ticket.  We had 'proxy' accounts set up on my old rt2
box at the last job specifically for this sort of thing.  You could set
up as many of these 'proxy' accounts as needed.  Another thing that
might help is that Joe Average might not want another password to
another ticketing system (that was the case at my old job), so we dumbed
the whole process down by making webform frontends for all of our
queues.  Webform dumps to mail and voila.

-----Original Message-----
From: rt-users-bounces at lists.bestpractical.com
[mailto:rt-users-bounces at lists.bestpractical.com] On Behalf Of John
Arends
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 5:02 PM
To: rt-users at lists.bestpractical.com
Subject: [rt-users] How to deal with people reopening old tickets

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
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