Hi all,

I read that VBP5 will remove the built-in contact us / support ticketing system. My members use this a lot and I've had some pretty good success making business deals with it.

What is the recommended replacement?

Thank you,

Mike

That's news to me. Where did you hear it? And we are talking about the Contact Us link on the bottom, right? If that's the case, the altrnative would be to use a third party app.

 

Hi all,

I read that VBP5 will remove the built-in contact us / support ticketing system. My members use this a lot and I've had some pretty good success making business deals with it.

What is the recommended replacement?

Thank you,

Mike

Contact Us is not being removed. What is removed is the ability to route support requests into a support ticket as there is no longer a commerce ticket system. You can choose to route those requests to an email account and respond via email.

For logged in members, you can have a forum where members can only see topics they create to have private discussions with staff/moderators.

Edited February 7Feb 7 by Randy Calvert

 

Hi all,

I read that VBP5 will remove the built-in contact us / support ticketing system. My members use this a lot and I've had some pretty good success making business deals with it.

What is the recommended replacement?

Thank you,

Mike

This is a system that I really appreciated a lot.

And when it was removed I also thought, why have an online sales system like an E-Commerce but not have a support ticket system? This change doesn't make much sense if we analyze it from that perspective.

Today a member told me:

You are wasting a lot of time in a community, most people nowadays prefer to use "Discord" the era of communities died more than 5 years ago. I really had no answers.

If we analyze the features of Discord the ease of integrating new resources through its own API.

But I will still try to break this in my field, and make them understand that a community is much more organized than Discord although Discord is dominating this market very easily.

Contact us is not being removed from the platform. We have removed the support system in v5 from commerce. If you need a full support system, you would need a 3rd party for this purpose.

There are a couple of options.

I've set up the old ways of supporting members, which is to create a new category and forum. Name it Support Requests and then set it to only posters can see their own posts. And, finally, set it to a question/answers forum.

The other option is to repurpose a bug track or directory service and change it to support requests. Which is something I may do later down the road.

 

There are a couple of options.

I've set up the old ways of supporting members, which is to create a new category and forum. Name it Support Requests and then set it to only posters can see their own posts. And, finally, set it to a question/answers forum.

The other option is to repurpose a bug track or directory service and change it to support requests. Which is something I may do later down the road.

That's definitely an interesting way to do it. Maybe we could also use the internal database feature of the software?

I've been looking at 3rd party options but most of them have a monthly or annual cost, which is typical. However, I am not seeing any kind of method to pass along user information between Invision and the 3rd party application. So basically if someone adds a support ticket, it's up to me to look up their account details and/or ask them to fill out a form with the details.

I am sad the included support / contact system was deprecated because I used it a LOT.

Mike

 

That's definitely an interesting way to do it. Maybe we could also use the internal database feature of the software?

I've been looking at 3rd party options but most of them have a monthly or annual cost, which is typical. However, I am not seeing any kind of method to pass along user information between Invision and the 3rd party application. So basically if someone adds a support ticket, it's up to me to look up their account details and/or ask them to fill out a form with the details.

I am sad the included support / contact system was deprecated because I used it a LOT.

Mike

Maybe just test the forum option for now and, see how you get on? It’s all in house, and you can keep track of posts.

Hello,

Someone told me there was a hole in my website, pretty sure hes 12 years old and looked up "how to become hacker hack website"

He sent me this

This code looks like someone ATTEMPTING to use SQL injections through account registrations. It looks like they're trying to register the usernames 1=1 and a few other basic "101 type" attack vectors that would allow execution of unintended SQL commands.

These don't work in Invision Community and is not a valid attack vector. Honestly this looks like a script kiddie who does not know what the scripts actually do or how to use them.

Edited March 19Mar 19 by Randy Calvert

 

Hello,

Someone told me there was a hole in my website, pretty sure hes 12 years old and looked up "how to become hacker hack website"

What is your forum version? As a rule of thumb regarding security is best to always use the latest version of whatever software and scripts one is using, including the third party stuff.

Edited March 19Mar 19 by Miss_B

Guys, nobody answered my question. What are the recommended 'contact us' options? There was a post somewhere about alternatives but I can't find it.

I get that technically "contact us" is not removed but the guts of it have been removed. Only thing available now is a method to configure an email address or link to another system. I have people telling me they are not able to get help and I need to fix this crucial part of interacting with my customers. Please help.

Thank you.

Mike

 

Guys, nobody answered my question. What are the recommended 'contact us' options? There was a post somewhere about alternatives but I can't find it.

I get that technically "contact us" is not removed but the guts of it have been removed. Only thing available now is a method to configure an email address or link to another system. I have people telling me they are not able to get help and I need to fix this crucial part of interacting with my customers. Please help.

Thank you.

Mike

The alternative is a custom app.

We do not have a specific recommended replacement. People are using multiple different things. Some have moved to custom apps, others are using external ticket systems, and some of those with integration from invision, some without

 

Guys, nobody answered my question. What are the recommended 'contact us' options?

It really depends on how you used the previous system. It’s hard to recommend something if we don’t know your requirements.
For support for logged in members, you can just set up a support forum with the option “can see other people’s post“ turned off. That pretty much works like a ticket system and mods and admin can deal with “tickets“ (i.e. topics). For guests wanting to send messages, again, it would depend on what your pain points would be. What does a basic email not offer that you need?

It was already said in the topic, but it seems some missed it:D
Just to clarify something because you've mentioned "contact us" several times => the built in CONTACT US option which sends an email to the admin or to predefined email addresses is still here, only the support ticket requests which were part of IPS4 Commerce were removed in IC5!

(Edit: Just a hint: We're using here an external URL as target, but you can try it on https://ic-essentials.com where it will open the contact us form

Thanks guys, yes I get that you provide a shortcut. But I'm not talking about the shortcut and more about the back end support system that was included. Before I upgraded, you had a warning message on the 4.7 admin panel about the feature going away. In that message there were a few recommended options. I cannot find that message so I'm looking for it.

About the email link, I turned it on for a month and now have thousands of spam emails. It's just not feasible without some kind of back-end form or something to prevent the abuse. The old system still allowed some spam through, but it was very good at reducing the crappy bot emails. Maybe it was the form, recaptcha, or ??

Thanks

It will likely have been that you were marking them as spam as they came in, and so the support system will have then been binning them off right away.