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Marked as "Acknowledged"

garvingarvin
edited October 2007 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
As I have posted before, I am using one of my vanilla installs as a project management tool for communication between the staff and our clientele. One of the problems is, we don't always respond right away because, well - my philosophy is to respond when I have an update for it or finish the request. However, more and more clients want to see an acknowledgement.

Now, obviously, i could respond with "This request has been acknowledged." However, I would like to have some kind of setup so that I don't have to post anything until I have a question or an actual response, that way keeping the discussion free from what I see as unnecessary responses, and treat it much like a modern-day email system, where you can mark posts as read or unread, even if you've read them all ready. I'd like this type of functionality. It would add a "read by our staff" graphic or line of text somewhere around the message, which can be set by a check mark. So, if I read something, and its directed to me, I can mark it read or acknowledged, or if its for another department, I can read it without marking it and the department that it is aimed for can then mark it read once they receive it.

Clear?

How hard would this be?

Comments

  • WallPhoneWallPhone
    Kind of hacky, but you could borrow the closed label, rename it to acknowledged, and give all your roles permission to post in closed discussions.

    This would work, assuming you don't have a need for closed discussions.
  • garvingarvin
    Well, that wouldn't work per se, because my clients aren't starting new discussions, they're responding to private ones. And, I don't want to label a dicussion as read, I want to label a comment within a discussion as read.
  • garvingarvin
    edited October 2007
    Bringing this back in the hopes that my ideas can be expressed a bit better and maybe it not being as hard to do.

    Here are my needs, with mockups:

    1. I am using Vanilla as a project manager system and want the ability to label a discussion as specific status. Pending, In Queue, In Progress, Complete. (*)

    image

    So, whether you are adding new comments, or editing your previous comment, it would appear in the post options.

    Here are two permission rules that I would need:

    a. New posts automatically make a discussion "Pending". Meaning, when you start a discussion, or just respond to the current discussion and do not set a status, it will automatically be "Pending".
    b. The ability to hide the function of choosing a status from those who aren't given the permission (role-based). Meaning an admin can choose the status of the discussion, but a normal visitor or member can not.
    c. When the two permission-rules work together, it would mean that Admins can set the status to whatever, but since the users couldn't even see the option, they would automatically choose to make it pending.
    d. Another perk of the two rules working together is that if a discussion is marked as In Queue or Complete, another roled-user could come on and "Reopen" it by setting it back to pending.

    2. After this is posted, then this is how the discussion list would look:

    image

    Obviously, I showed my reason to use such a feature. You could use the same idea with the premoderation addon so that when it is posted, it automatically is pending, and then when a moderator sees it, they could post "Received." and set it as In Queue. Then, when they have a chance to read the post, they could then edit their post, and set the status to In Moderation, or if they have seen it, Posted or Rejected.

    Or even just simpler setup, like a general discussion board and you have two people whispering back and forth and one person posts the whisper, and the other person could let them know when they read it by replying to it. But, if they don't have time to reply now, they could reply "Read. Response to come" and give it the status "Thinking." If they are then able to response, they can set it to "Responded" when they post their new message.

    So, it wouldn't be available on EVERY post, but just on the new post or most recent post. That way, someone couldn't go in and edit a post from 5 months ago after there have been posts more recent made and then try and change the status back to pending.

    I would think that it would be attached to the discussion and not to the individual post. Like, by changing a row in the discussion db, not the individual comment such as the "Thanks" addon does. And then there would need to be 2 basic permissions: the ability to set status and the ability to see the different status options.

    Is this something that could be done easily?

    (* I am aware of the Tech Support type help desk add-on that Jazzman was working on, which is being used for Lussumo.com/bugs. However, --all though I could be wrong--, it was damn near impossible to convert a current forum into it and most installs were suggested to start from scratch, so I never moved my community over. Also, I don't all of the same functionalty. I just want to be able to set a status of discussion, so that the members of our community know when their projects are being worked on. *)
This discussion has been closed.