Monash eResearch Centre

This is a test topic. I'm curious to know if Freshdesk's forum feature is a viable alternative to tickets. 

Here is a good FAQ from FreshDesk about their forums feature: https://support.freshdesk.com/en/support/solutions/folders/272623.

A user guide for forums: https://support.freshdesk.com/en/support/solutions/articles/37603-building-your-community-with-forums-in-freshdesk.

Benefits:

1. Users can support each other if their forum posts are public.  Other users may have more knowledge of the particular software than us staff do! This also could save staff time and effort.
2. Users can search forum for related problems before posting. This could reduce essentially duplicate tickets that ask about same issues.
3. Acts as a public-facing knowledge base for small details that don't belong in our M3/MonArch docs. A lot of support tickets don't belong in e.g. https://docs.massive.org.au/, but this means we don't have any public database of these little details that could be relevant to future users.
4. Forum topics can be converted into tickets. This can be automatically done for every forum topic, or done manually by agents. When responding to these tickets, you can choose to only email the user, or post the response in the forum, meaning we can still do "private" communication if necessary.
5. Can create private forums if that is suitable for anything.
6. Can also make forums public to non-logged in users, or only to logged-in users. The non-logged in seems ideal for most tickets.
7. We can moderate forums to be safe. I.e. we can review a forum topic before it is published, and only then make it visible. Good in case anyone decides to send their private SSH key to us!
8. Users get access to FreshDesk formatting. This includes code snippets, which are preferable to users' plain-text emails with no monospace code!
9. Can make sticky topics. This could be for e.g. planned maintenance, or maybe surveys.
10. Can lock forum topics. 

Drawbacks:

1. Users must log in to FreshDesk, rather than sending simple email.
2. Current users have to change how they access support.
3. Current agents need to become accustomed to forums in addition to tickets.
4. FreshDesk text input can be a little annoying to me sometimes, e.g. keyboard shortcuts for moving cursor around don't always behave as I would expect.