Amara.org Support Center

Could you explain the difference, in this Amara freshdesk.com support, between submitting a ticket and starting a forum discussion? I mean, other than the fact that a ticket is only between the submitter and the Amara team, while a discussion is public?
In other support solutions, submitted tickets are searchable by all to avoid repetitions, and are more structured: i.e. when you submit one, you are asked to  indicate - or the software automatically picks - your OS and used browser, and you are invited to add categories / tags. I couldn't find that in the freshdesk ticket submitting process.
So could you perhaps explain when users should use tickets and when forum discussions?
Thanks

Hi Claude,

At present, forum posts can be raised to tickets by users or internally so we may alert a specific department to a conversation and convert it to a task. I have made a request to Freshdesk for the ability to likewise turn tickets into public forums.

The way Freshdesk works, it looks like the best answer to your question is that tickets are great for reporting bugs and errors, and for requesting features or changes. Forums help in building community around all things Amara. They also help prevent redundant issues. As explained in Freshdesk's Forum page:

Forums have been segmented into 4 categories

1. Questions - Users can raise simple questions or request for any Tips and Tricks within your product. Other users can click on the 'I have this question' button and agents will get the count on number of users with the same question. If any other user or agent replies to this question and you think, this is the correct response, Agents can be allowed to submit the answer using 'This Answers the question' or they can Edit the content and reply back to this topic.

2. Ideas - These can be used by your customers for raising a new feature requests and agents can submit the status of the requested feature. Agents can move the feature request to Planned,Implemented or Not taken.

3. Problems - Users can post their issues/problems here. If any other user has similar problem, they can use the 'I have this problem' button. Count will be shown to the Agents on How many users have the same problem.

4. Announcements - This can be used for updates or product release related announcements.

Best regards,

Marisa

I was reminded of this exchange with Marisa Jean Browne tonight, when I got 15 identical ticket closure notifications in a lump, mostly for tickets unanswered since April, apart from a couple she had replied to back then.

Now the notifications all say:

Because of the very high volume of incoming support tickets and the size of our small non-profit staff, we're resetting the clock by marking all tickets closed. Our support staff is switching focus to building better documentation, which will make the platform easier for everyone to use. However, this doesn't mean we don't want to help! Here are a few suggestions, in case your question about Amara isn't already solved:

• If you're looking for information about our enterprise (i.e. team) platform, please contact: [email protected]
• If you're an Amara user (volunteer, translator, video producer, etc) and have a question about the platform, please post on the forums where support staff and other users can help you out: http://pculture.freshdesk.com/categories
• If you don't see an answer on the forums, take a look at our user documentation: http://pculture.freshdesk.com/solution/categories  
• If you're a TED OTP translator, please check the sidebar here for more support details: http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/ted/  

Thanks, Darren B and the Amara Team

Building a better documentation is indeed a good idea: the present one - see the Solutions section - is in great part obsolete, having been just reposted from the Knowledge Base of the former Amara Help (when it was still called Universal Subtitles). And so is the invitation to use the forum rather than tickets.

But to me the most interesting part is the first alternative suggestion, "If you're looking for information about our enterprise (i.e. team) platform, please contact: [email protected]".

It clarifies the status of teams in Amara, where they now all come under its Enterprise services, even those created back in Universal Subtitles times without an external commission,  like e.g. Japan Recovery, Occupy Wall Street, SOPA or more recently, Music Captioning.

While these teams may have been the expression of a social commitment initially, now their being part of the Amara Enterprise services reduces them to showcases and/or testing materials for these services.

And that's absolutely fine, now that it has been clearly stated in these ticket closure notifications. When I was a student in London, I'd get my haircuts at a hairdressing school. The result was sometimes bizarre, but heck, for the price, I couldn't complain, could I?

Same here, except in one aspect: I was made an admin in some of these teams when they were Universal Subtitles teams, but not part of its paid services. I don't want to be an admin in showcases for Amara's Enterprise services. So I've left some, and in one case - Music Captioning - I left and rejoined as contributor: Music Captioning has four Amara people as admins anyway. Let them deal with Amara's next testing experiment between themselves.