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Akeeba Ticket System

#29892 Remove: !-!- Please reply above this line {ticketid: } -!-!

Posted in ‘Akeeba Ticket System for Joomla! 4 & 5’
This is a public ticket

Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Environment Information

Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Akeeba Ticket System version
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Latest post by nicholas on Monday, 02 July 2018 05:26 CDT

aradise
How do I edit or remove this? !-!- Please reply above this line {ticketid:4} -!-!

It really needs to be better worded since this looks like computer code to the layman. Something like "Please reply above this line. Your Ticket ID #4 from Organization Name."

Thanks in advance!
Tony

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
There's a reason it looks like computer code: it is. We need to be able to detect replies with accuracy and know which ticket it refers to. Regarding the latter, we do add a custom mail header but some clients (especially those by a rather famous company based in Redmond) remove it.

The solution is a unique marker which cannot appear in normal conversation text and will not risk modification by the user and which also contains the ticket ID in a format that can be easily parsed by a computer. What you proposed may be accidentally edited or removed exactly because it looks like plain English; the recipient can misunderstand it as "write your reply above this line and delete everything below it, including this line". It's not a theoretical issue; it's happened before. Several attempts at solving it resulted in the special line you see now.

You may think that email replies to tickets is a simple matter. It is, if you are a human reading the email. It's an insanely complicated matter if you are a computer because you are trying to figure things out despite what well meaning humans and various generations of mail clients implementing various generations of contradicting and vague "standards" will throw your way. In fact, there is no real standard for most things regarding email. It's all a hodgepodge of arbitrary decisions and creative interpretations of vague rules. Email clients, much like browsers, are held together with string and duct tape. The more you get in the specifics of either the less plausible it seems that anything on the Internet actually works...

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

aradise
I get what you are saying but other websites have found ways to make the ticket process much more intuitive and easy to understand, for the casual user.

As a designer (not a coder) my objectives are different. My main concern is my users and the 70 old lady who posts a trouble ticket and gets that message will be confused. Any chance we could hide it from plain site, like at the bottom in a smaller font?

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Other companies use ZenDesk. Unlike us, ZenDesk has a budget of several millions of Euros per year to test the countless combinations of email servers and clients. That's why you pay an arm and a leg for using their service (and your data is locked with them, forever).

Regarding your point, no, we cannot put the line at the end of the email because anything above that line ends up in the reply. Therefore the entire email thread (all previous posts) would end up in every ticket reply posted by email. The reason this line is added is to PREVENT that. I didn't think I have to explain this since it's self-understood.

As to whether you can make it smaller, no. Making it smaller means that you are using HTML tags. Depending on the mail client these may be converted to SPAN, FONT, P or even nested DIV elements. You no longer have a predictable marker to indicate the start of the reply. See my previous reply to you, I explained that.

If not including such a line is so important to you then please don't use ATS. After all, replies by email are now illegal under the European Union's GDPR, therefore we have no reason to keep developing this feature, let alone spend money and resources we don't have and can't ever afford to improve it. Sorry.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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