Community Forums
We'd like to provide some community forums for discussion primarily between our customers. Tender does a great job of presenting support issues in a forum format, in fact because it does such a good job, it would be very confusing to add another forum software to our site, as it would look like the site had two forums. Yet Tender doesn't seem appropriate as a general purpose community forum because of lots of little issues. For example, the checkbox about whether a post should be private or not - in a community forum category, all should be public. Another issue is tying a ticket status to everything - there should be no ticket status for a community forum.
Is Tender going to be adding more general forum support into the product? I would think this would be a very general concern, as currently plain vanilla forums are the norm for support forums, which makes it something customers expect. I like how Tender takes support tickets and by default makes them public, but I still need some sort of community forum support, and it's almost like using Tender on our site eliminates our ability to add another forum software, since it would be too confusing to the users.
I saw a response to a similar question earlier, which said there might be a blog post last November about this, but it didn't seem to happen.
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1 Posted by rick on 09 Jan, 2010 01:40 PM
I've experimented with this. I actually added a hidden option to disable the whole support issue aspect. This means that everything is public, and there's no open/resolved status involved. This brings up a few questions that I've yet to answer:
Do you want to give it a go next week? I want to try it out with some other stuff to make sure I'm not missing anything major though.
2 Posted by josh on 09 Jan, 2010 02:51 PM
Hey Rick,
I learned of Tender only very recently, so take this with the understanding that I haven't conceptualized the whole product yet, on the other hand a fresh perspective can be useful:
On #1, I feel very strongly that this column simply shouldn't exist for forum discussions (optionally a column could exist with some other purpose, like number of views or whatever). I actually don't really like the status being displayed for the other categories either -- I feel this makes the support forum look somewhat too technical for most users (for developers used to bug tracking it may be fine, but my users are less technical). I thought of mentioning this in my initial post, but then I realized that since you are integrating ticketing into the forum, there was probably no other way as status is important for ticketing, anyways I didn't have any better idea. However for a public forum, the status serves no purpose, so I see no need to complicate the UI with a status column.
On #2, I don't feel strongly but think it would be ok to not list them in the dashboard. Actually if you are going to add forum categories, I feel it may be useful to further differentiate the "ticketed" items from the "community forum" items, and to this extent it would be useful if the dashboard was explicitly labeled something like "My issues" and contained only the ticketed items, and additionally it was clear which was a ticketed category, and which was a community forum category. Honestly the whole concept of combining ticketing with community forums complicates things, but I realized the Tender approach has a lot of power in that ticketed support items make themselves to a publicly visible forum, and both private & public communications are integrated into one place for the user, so I think it's a better design/worthwhile even if some things are more complex and are somewhat atypical compared with current practices that users are accustomed to.
On #3, don't have any real opinion of what should be there right now, but even if it is blank and looks bad, I think integrating community forums into the same UI is more important.
Since it sounds like you're going to address community forums one way or another, I think I'm going to give it a go and integrate Tender into the support section of my app. I'm going to launch in 1-2 weeks but will begin integrating Tender tomorrow. So yeah I'll give whatever you got a try as soon as it's available.
3 Posted by rick on 09 Jan, 2010 03:21 PM
The reasoning behind the special state is so that discussions in the 'community forums' specifically do not show up in the dashboard under open/resolved issues. I don't plan on showing states on the community discussions. I plan on removing as much as I can possibly get away with: states and internal replies. Ticket tracker integration will probably stay -- but your users won't see it unless you actually attach a ticket.
I agree on #2, I'm really leaning towards not listing them at all in the dashboard.
I should have something for you to mess around with sometime next week.
4 Posted by josh on 09 Jan, 2010 11:38 PM
Cool will look forward to trying it out
5 Posted by rick on 16 Jan, 2010 07:51 PM
Hey Josh: I didn't forget about you. I actually setup a forum in 'community mode'. I'm afraid this is going to have to wait on some other changes we're making to the Dashboard. I need to get the community forum discussions out of the Inbox and Open issues.
If this current issue is okay for you, I can turn on community mode for one of your existing categories.
6 Posted by josh on 18 Jan, 2010 11:46 AM
Hi Rick,
NP - I mostly just wanted to know if supporting community-style forums was something you were going to accommodate or not before selecting Tender, we won't have a pressing need for several more weeks as we're still pre-launch. However I did go ahead and create a category called "Internet Marketing" which you could put into community-mode -- I'd be curious to start checking it out.
Glad you're planning on taking community forums out of the open issues dialog, that sounds like a good way to go.
BTW the more I work with Tender, the more I like it. Some things may still be rough around the edges, but at it's core it's an extremely powerful framework, and the number of integrations it does from multipass to email to discussion-like forums are extremely impressive, and I think our small yet-to-be-launched SaaS app has a much better support setup than many bigger companies. Keep up the good work, and we'll definitely be integrating Lighthouse as soon as our dev team grows a bit more.
7 Posted by rick on 18 Jan, 2010 08:33 PM
Okay I set that category up. What do you think about removing private discussions? Or attachment uploading?
What are you using for tickets? We're looking at expanding the ticket integration, so I'm curious what others use.
8 Posted by Robert on 21 Jan, 2010 09:12 PM
Rick,
How can I active the "community mode"? I am using the free trial plan right now.
(I started this tread https://help.tenderapp.com/discussions/questions/421-use-tender-as-...)
R
9 Posted by rick on 21 Jan, 2010 10:16 PM
It's not available to you yet. Just give me a specific category and I'll do it manually. Once I've made some required database updates I'll probably make the option available to everyone.
10 Posted by Robert on 21 Jan, 2010 10:35 PM
OK, could you please put it in the category "Support Group".
Do you know when it will be available for everyone?
R
11 Posted by rick on 21 Jan, 2010 10:38 PM
When it's ready :) Soon, I hope. I'm shooting for early February, but
anytime I give estimates I'm waaaay off.
What site are you using? Your email doesn't come up in my searches.
12 Posted by Robert on 21 Jan, 2010 10:45 PM
OK, sounds good. It will be a longed-for function.
Try the email I entered for this reply. (I used my private one for the previous posts.)
R
13 Posted by rick on 21 Jan, 2010 10:51 PM
All set.
Right now, you have the option to hide the support workflow enabled.
I'm looking at adding two more options for further customization:
disable private discussions (enabling users to email stuff publicly to
the category and treat it like a mailing list) and disable asset
uploads.
14 Posted by Robert on 21 Jan, 2010 10:59 PM
Great.
Perfect, I was just about to ask you about those two customizations.
Thank you very much for you help. If I need some more help I'll get back to you.
Best regards,
R
15 Posted by Robert on 21 Jan, 2010 11:10 PM
Ha ha, already back with a problem.
I am trying to invite members, but only people who have an email address on their own domain receives the invitation mail. People who use a hotmail address for instance do not receive it. Do you know what the problem might be?
Thanks,
R
16 Posted by rick on 22 Jan, 2010 12:03 AM
Check their spam. If you create a private issue and give me the hotmail address, I can do a lookup and tell you when the email was sent. 99% of the time, the user just needs to check their spam box.
Also, would you mind creating new Tender discussions for new issues? We're spamming poor Josh with these replies :)
17 Posted by Jack O'Hurley on 12 May, 2010 09:12 PM
On January 21, 2010, Rick said that
"Right now, you have the option to hide the support workflow enabled. I'm looking at adding two more options for further customization:
disable private discussions (enabling users to email stuff publicly to
the category and treat it like a mailing list) and disable asset
uploads."
I don't see this functionality within Categories. Am I missing something?
18 Posted by Robert on 23 Jun, 2010 09:29 PM
Rick,
I asked you earlier this year (January) when you would be able to use Tender as a regular forum. You told when it's ready, so is it ready yet?
Robert
19 Posted by Will on 23 Jun, 2010 09:35 PM
Hey Robert. Such functionality is not currently ready. We have a lot on our roadmap and we're working to get through it as quickly as possible.
Will closed this discussion on 18 Aug, 2010 10:16 PM.