Support tickets

A member presses a button and gets a private channel to talk with your staff: about help, a ban appeal, a store problem or a player report. Staff claim the ticket, close it when it is sorted, and a copy of the conversation is kept.

Set it up

On the dashboard, switch on Support tickets under Settings, Features.
Make sure your staff roles are set under Staff roles. Tickets are seen by staff from the Helper level up.
Open Tickets, then Ticket types and panel. Add the usual four types (Help, Report a player, Ban appeal, Store / purchase) with one button, or make your own.
For each type, choose who on your staff sees it (leave it empty for all staff), which roles to ping on a new ticket, and up to five questions to ask when opening.
Post the ticket panel in a channel members can read, such as #support. In Discord, /ticket panel does the same.

The bot needs Manage Channels and Manage Roles to make a channel for each ticket that only the right people can see, plus View Channels, Send Messages, Embed Links, Read Message History and Attach Files. If one is missing, members are told plainly and /doctor lists it.

Opening a ticket

A member presses the button for the kind of ticket they need (or picks it from a menu when there are more than five), answers the questions, and the bot makes a channel such as ticket-0042-steve in your ticket category. Only that member, the staff who see that type of ticket and the bot can see it. Members can also type /ticket open.

To keep things calm, a member can have one open ticket per type, three open tickets at most by default, and waits a minute between new tickets. When too many tickets are open in the whole server, new ones are paused. You can change each of these limits under Settings, Tickets.

Handling a ticket

Claim: say you are the one answering. The button on the first message, or /ticket claim.
Close: the button asks to confirm first. The member who opened the ticket can close it too. Staff can give a reason with /ticket close reason:.
/ticket add member: and /ticket remove member: let someone else into the ticket or take them out again.
/ticket rename name: gives the channel a clearer name. Discord allows two renames every ten minutes.
/tickets lists the tickets of the types you see.

When a ticket closes, the bot posts a closing note, the member can still read but no longer write, and the channel is deleted a few seconds later (or after the number of hours you chose). A short summary with a link to the ticket's page can go to a staff log channel, and the member can get a copy as a text file by direct message. Both are settings.

On the dashboard, the Tickets page lists open and recent tickets with simple numbers (open now, opened this week, the usual wait for staff's first answer). Each ticket's page shows the answers and the whole conversation, and lets staff close it or reopen it for a few days after closing.

Who sees which tickets

Admins see every ticket. Other staff see the tickets of the types their roles may see. On the web panel, the server's administrators see everything; people an administrator added under Panel access see the ticket types their Discord roles may see, once the bot has reported their roles (within ten minutes).

What is kept, and for how long

For each ticket: who opened, claimed and closed it, when, and the reason for closing.
The answers to the questions, and a copy of every message in the ticket's channel (the text, the names of and links to attached files, and earlier versions of edited messages). Messages deleted in Discord stay in the copy, marked as deleted.
The answers and messages are encrypted with your server's own key, the same key as the chat logs.
A closed ticket and its copy are deleted 90 days after closing by default; you can choose between 7 and 365 days. Open tickets are kept while they are open.
The server owner's download of everything (Your server's data) includes every ticket with its answers and messages, decrypted.

Copying message text needs Discord's Message Content permission for the bot. Without it, the copy only shows who wrote when, and the answers to the questions. The dashboard says so when that is the case.