Support Desk¶

Updated 22 October 2026

PNLCS has a ticket desk for customer questions, and four kinds of pages customers can read for themselves: announcements, downloads, a knowledge base and a network status page. This page covers all of them.

To let customers open and answer tickets by email, see Support Mail Piping.

Before the first ticket¶

1. Setup → Ticket Departments: check the departments and their addresses (below).
2. Setup → General Settings → Company Email: the address that gets an email for every new ticket and every customer reply (Staff alerts).
3. Setup → Ticket Statuses: decide whether answered tickets should close by themselves (Statuses).
4. Setup → Ticket Spam Filter, and reCAPTCHA under Setup → General Settings → Google reCAPTCHA protection, if the contact form is public.
5. Make sure email sending works: customers get their ticket replies by email.

Departments¶

Setup → Ticket Departments

A ticket always belongs to one department. Add Department asks for:

Edit opens the same fields plus the mailbox settings for mail import. Delete removes a department.

The Tickets column on this page shows 0 for every department in 1.6.1, whatever the real count.

Statuses and auto-close¶

Setup → Ticket Statuses

A fresh install has six statuses: Open, Answered, Customer-Reply, On Hold, In Progress and Closed. PNLCS sets three of them by itself:

The others (On Hold, In Progress and any you add) are only set by hand, from the ticket page. Keep the names Open, Answered, Customer-Reply and Closed: the code and the admin sidebar's ticket filters (Open, Awaiting Reply, Closed) look for exactly these.

Add Status / Edit:

Close inactive tickets¶

At the top of the page, Close inactive tickets after (hours) (0 to 8760) turns auto-close on. 0, the default, turns it off.

Once an hour PNLCS closes every ticket that is in a status marked Close automatically when inactive and has had no reply for that many hours. It is closed exactly as if staff had closed it. No status is marked on a fresh install: tick Answered if tickets you replied to and the customer never came back to should close by themselves.

Ticket escalation¶

Tickets nobody has answered for a while can be reassigned, moved, raised in priority or given an automatic reply. This is set up on the Ticket Escalation Rules page, which has no menu entry in 1.6.1; see Escalation rules.

Predefined replies¶

Setup → Predefined Replies

Saved answers staff can drop into a reply.

1. Under Categories, type a name in New category and press Add.
2. Under Add a reply, pick the category, give the reply a Reply name, write the Reply text and Save.

Each saved reply opens below for editing or Delete. Deleting a category deletes its replies too.

On a ticket, Insert a predefined reply… above the reply box lists every category that has replies. The chosen text is placed in the reply box, where you can still change it before Send reply.

Spam filter¶

Setup → Ticket Spam Filter

Checked when a new ticket comes in through the client area ticket form, the Contact Us form or mail import. Tickets opened by staff or through the API, and replies to an existing ticket, are not checked.

Save Spam Filter Settings replaces both lists with what is in the boxes. Stored Spam Filters below lists every pattern, with Add Filter for a single one and Delete for each.

A refused ticket is not saved anywhere. On the client area form the customer is told the message was flagged as spam.

Working a ticket¶

Support → Support Tickets lists tickets, last reply first. The sidebar filters by Open, Awaiting Reply (Customer-Reply) and Closed, and by department and priority. Only tickets without an account and deleting tickets are covered in Support Mail Piping.

Support → Open Ticket opens a ticket for a customer: their client ID or email address, the department, subject, message, priority and, optionally, one of their services. The customer gets it by email.

On a ticket page:

• Add reply sends your answer to the customer by email and sets the ticket to Answered.
• Add internal note: only staff see notes; they are never emailed. A note can be deleted only by the person who wrote it.
• The options bar changes Status, Priority (Low, Medium, High), Department and Assigned to. Choosing Closed closes the ticket.
• Customer rating shows the score once the customer has rated a closed ticket.

Staff permissions: list tickets for the list, view tickets to open one, reply tickets to reply, write notes and open tickets, manage tickets for the options bar and deleting. The setup pages above need manage ticket config. See Staff & Roles.

Staff alerts¶

PNLCS emails the Company Email address (Setup → General Settings) for:

• every new ticket that did not come from staff (client area, contact form, email, or the API without a staff user), and
• every customer reply.

Nothing is sent per department or to the assigned staff member. For alerts in Slack, Telegram or another system, add rules for ticket.opened and ticket.replied under Notification channels.

What the customer sees¶

In the client area, under Support:

• Open Ticket: department (hidden ones are left out), subject, priority (low, medium or high; medium by default), the service it is about, the message and one attachment.
• My Tickets: their tickets, and on each one the replies, Post a Reply with one attachment, and Close ticket. A closed ticket has no reply form; it offers a new ticket instead.
• Once a ticket is closed, a one-time rating from 1 to 5 with an optional comment.

Attachments: one file per message, up to 10 MB, of type jpg, png, gif, pdf, doc, docx, txt or zip. Only the customer who owns the ticket can download them. Attachments that arrive by email follow the mail import limits.

Contact Us at /client/contact is open to anyone, signed in or not. It opens a ticket with medium priority in the department the visitor chose.

If reCAPTCHA is on for tickets (Setup → General Settings → Google reCAPTCHA protection), the ticket form asks for it too.

Announcements¶

Support → Announcements

New Announcement: Title, Category (free text; categories already used are suggested), Content and Publish immediately. Untick it to keep a draft. Edit has a Published switch.

Customers read them at /client/announcements, signed in or not: newest first, 15 a page, with a filter for each category in use. The latest 20 are also an RSS feed at /client/announcements.rss.

Content is plain text: line breaks are kept, HTML is shown as typed.

Downloads¶

Support → Downloads

Files for customers: software, documentation, contracts.

1. Add Category: every download sits in one.

2. Add Download:

   Field	What it does
   Name	The title customers see.
   Category	Which category it is listed under.
   Description	Optional text below the name.
   Upload a file	The file is kept private on the server and only handed out through PNLCS, to customers allowed to have it.
   Or a link to the file	An address the customer is sent to instead. Anyone who has the link can open it.
   Only for owners of	Pick one or more products. Only customers with an active service of one of them see and can download it. Left empty, every signed-in customer can.
   Published	Untick to hide it while you prepare it.

   A new download needs a file or a link.

Each category lists its downloads with the file name, a download count and Edit / Delete. Delete Category deletes the category with all its downloads and their uploaded files.

Customers must sign in. The list is at /client/downloads; the default client area menu has no link to it, so put the address in your menu, an announcement or your welcome email. A download a customer is not allowed to have returns "not found". Each download is counted and recorded in the Activity Log.

Knowledge base¶

Support → Knowledge Base

1. + Category: a Category Name and an optional Description. Categories can be renamed under Categories → Edit; there is no way to delete one from this page.
2. + New Article: Title, Category, Content and Publish immediately. Pick a real category: — Uncategorized — is refused when you save.

The article list shows each article's views and whether it is Published or a Draft.

The knowledge base is public, at /client/knowledgebase: no sign-in is needed. Visitors see published articles grouped by category, with a search over titles and text. Drafts return "not found" even with a direct link. Article text is plain text, like announcements.

To hide the whole knowledge base, untick Show the knowledge base to customers under Setup → General Settings. Its menu links disappear and its addresses return "not found".

Translations¶

When more than one language is active, the announcement, article and category forms have a Translations section, one fold per active language other than the default. Fill in the title (or the category name) and the text for that language. Readers using that language see the translation; leave the title empty and they see the default text. See Languages.

Network status¶

Support → Network Issues

Tell customers about outages and planned maintenance. Report Issue asks for:

Edit also has End Date (if resolved). When the problem is over, set Status to Resolved and fill in the end date.

Customers see it at /client/network-status (Support → Network Status in the client area), signed in or not. Issues that are not resolved are listed first; the last 10 resolved ones are shown with their end date. With nothing open, the page says all systems are operational.

Every issue created from this form shows priority Medium: the form has no priority, start date or affected-server field in 1.6.1.

The pages in this section need the manage announcements permission (announcements) or manage kb (downloads, knowledge base and network issues).