One feature I intend to fold into SMF Marketplace (which will use SimpleDesk for issues that the admins need to fix up, like PayPal issues, reports of unsafe mods/themes, that kind of thing) is one that I think might be useful more generally for SimpleDesk.
Right now, reporting a PM to admins, and reporting messages are handled by SMF in their own way.
What I'm thinking of doing is replacing that interface slightly and using SD to manage it, such that if a PM is reported, the report plus original message is turned into a ticket, marked private, so only the admin by default (as of 1.1 at least) can see it. If admins then choose to open that up... that's something else.
Note that this would *replace* the existing system.
As for reporting messages, this would optionally either create a ticket as well as, or instead of, a report in the mod centre (for my stuff I'd use the former, since board moderators don't have any special rights in SD generally)
I think this would clean up the way it's handled, since it's less hidden away from moderators, and also means there is going to be *some* kind of feedback to the user, since right now there's absolutely no feedback to the user when a report is taken care of.
It's always about innovation, isn't it? ;D So let's see what it can do and generally I don't see how bad or worse it can get unless we try, only then will you get better ideas and feedback that way. I said...go for it and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Quote from: Dismal Shadow on May 16, 2010, 02:14:38 PM
It's always about innovation, isn't it? ;D
Yes, yes it is. :P
So, that's +1... anyone else?
I think it's a good idea! :)
Nice idea.
The other thing that occurs to me is how more than one person has requested reports be posted into a board; this would naturally satisfy the requirement.
The one downside is that local moderators wouldn't normally have access, this is something I would expect to be refined with department support.
Then make a new section named Forum Reports like Closed Tickets etc., and put everything there. Give mods the access to go their. And for the local mods, put the board id on report (e.g hidden input), and give access them by getting id_member and id_board from moderators table.
Shouldn't be that hard? :)
You'd think so, but it's far more complex than it sounds like it should be.
In fact, it's a MAJOR overhaul of SimpleDesk to do that, including a whole new workflow of tickets, ticket status, ticket visibility rules and so on.
Right now, tickets have a status, which for speed isn't dynamically generated but stored until something happens that makes it change. Everything down to which block it appears in is triggered by that status and some additional logic (since 'New' and 'Pending Staff' are collapsed to 'Pending Staff' for regular users, plus 'Assigned To Me' only appears for staff etc)
This would require new status's, plus rewrites of all the logic that drives ticket visibility. Doable, sure, but uber messy since it's effectively a duplication of what we have now.
Or we wait for that to happen naturally with Departments support ;)
Note I'm deliberately not saying what version any of this should happen in, I'm just trying to get a feel for whether it's the way to go here generally to add it as a feature for SD-core or just for my one-off implementation, because then we can bump it into the roadmap appropriately etc.
This sounds pretty awesome
This doesn't really sound like something I'd like to see in SD core, but at the same time I think it's a cool idea. How about creating a mod-of-a-mod? lol j/k
B
SimplePortal has mods of the mod! :)
Quote from: Bᵃ on May 17, 2010, 02:11:37 AM
This doesn't really sound like something I'd like to see in SD core, but at the same time I think it's a cool idea. How about creating a mod-of-a-mod?
Any particular reason?
I'm not overly keen on mod-of-a-mod, personally. It brings management issues, as well as people not reading the instructions on 'you have to uninstall this mod to uninstall SD' when it's upgrade time.
That said, for fringe features it may be best.
EDIT: If we were to add it to core, it would likely be in 1.2.
Quote from: Arantor on May 17, 2010, 04:07:24 AM
Any particular reason?
To me it seems to fall outside the scope of a helpdesk. It's more of an SMF mod that adds information to SD. I could see it as a mod that's applied after SD is already installed, but it seems out of place in SD core.
B
That makes sense. At the same time, it seems to me to be a natural funnel for what would be another source of ticket type issues - if you're using the helpdesk on a conventional forum.
That's really why I asked - I'm going to be implementing this anyway for my own uses, and I figured I'd open it up to see whether folks would want this generally, and how it should be delivered.
On the same note, I'd point to things like the track IP integration that we already have as an example of how it's bridged into SMF.
My Dumb Question for the day:
What is SMF Marketplace? is that like an e-commerce/store front or like an e-Bay auctions, or Members "Classifieds" or something? sounds interesting whatever it is.
SMF Marketplace was conceived as a place users could go to buy and sell mods and themes for SMF. Given recent events I'm really not sure I want to pursue this project at this time though.
As it happens, I just wrote a draft version of 'report to moderator' being redirected to the helpdesk as an SD plugin, and committed it to SVN, so hopefully when we can ship a version of SD that has the plugin system, you can get that too :)
sweet 8)