[rt-users] Randomizing / Masking Ticket Numbers / or Intelligently concatenating multiple numbers as ticket number.

[Reza]

Thank you for your detailed response Jeff.

Thinking out of the box, a Random Number is not necessary if we can mask 
it from email responses.   In my specific case, I do not want non-staff 
to access RT.  Only support agents.

Is some sort of ID number absolutely necessary in the subject field and 
can this be removed?  I guess a more technical question is how RT tracks 
the email thread?   Is it through the headers, or a basic primitive 
Subject field comparison ?

Then again... I'm thinking...  a ticket number is so much easier if its 
relayed to support agents by caller if they decide to simply call for 
support.

Thoughts, ideas and suggestions welcome.

Best,
Reza.


Jeffrey Pilant wrote on 10/25/2016 2:43 PM:
> Reza writes:
>> The use case for random IDs is quite simple.   Ascending / serial number
>> of IDs compromises confidentiality.  End users would be able to guess
>> how busy I could be with the amount of tickets answered.  Its something
>> I don't want to disclose.   Almost ALL ticketing systems I have seen,
>> have a random arbitrary numeric or alpha-numeric ID.  Any other
>> suggestions on how to approach not displaying an obvious number to end
>> users?
> I don't think I have ever seen a random number for ticket ID.
> I have seen many systems that show reports of number of tickets processed per unit of time and he average answer time.
> I guess I have never encountered your need before.
>
> Seeing a series of ticket IDs may tell them how fast tickets come in, but it will not tell them how fast they are answered.
>
> What might be easier is to create a custom field that holds a random number (maybe a GUID?).  This number could then be placed in the email subject line in place of the ticket ID.  Likiewise, the email reader could read the number from the subject and look up the ID.  This would touch a lot fewer places in the code, and if the recipient only ever sees the email, they don't know the real number.  Meanwhile, users of the web interface see both real number and random number.
>
> If you allow them to see the web interface, the above will not work.
>
> A simple possible solution is to add a random amount to the ticket sequence in the code that generates ticket numbers.  You will need a much larger max ticket ID since there is so much wasted space, but the random nature will obscure the number of real tickets between two given ticket IDs.
>
> /jeff
>
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