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

[Kenneth Crocker]

John,


	We put a message at the VERY TOP of the Resolve template that reads "DO 
NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE!!!". It works most of the time. For those that 
do NOT pay attention, we remove the "CreateTicket" right, so they have 
to go thru the WebUI in the future and if that doesn't work, we would 
remove them as a privileged member. That way they could GET emails, but 
not reply to them thru RT.
	All in all, there no "easy" way. You just have to try a couple things 
and hope it works. I like to think that user education is the easiest 
and most productive, but sometime the punitive method (remove rights, 
etc.) has to be employed. Lots of luck.


Kenn
LBNL

On 3/13/2008 2:02 PM, John Arends wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users
> 
> Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com
> Commercial support: sales at bestpractical.com
> 
> 
> Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. 
> Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
>