Whilst I totally understand that forum members might not want to have links to their domains displayed publicly (I'm one of them), I feel very strongly that the move earlier this year to hide all links on tickets is counter-productive.
I personally scour the forum for ways to implement things and for solutions to any issues I may be having before I raise a ticket. With all links hidden, we now don't have the full picture and in many cases this renders a previous ticket useless and this means I then have to raise a ticket on the same subject. This isn't a good use of either my time or yours.
There are also many links to other tickets or outside resources that are publicly available generally (and so wouldn't involve unwanted disclosure of a domain name) that can't be used because they're hidden. This reduces greatly the quality and usefulness of the forum.
Did you know incidentally that when a member is subscribed to a ticket, they see the content of hidden links in the emails that are sent when a member of support staff responds??? Where's the logic in that? And actually this means you're contravening GDPR by sharing someone else's details when they perceived them to be hidden!!!
Before links were hidden, I used to replaced my domain name with something generic but this, of course, isn't helpful if support staff actually need a valid link.
I think the compromise lies in publishing links by default but giving us the ability to hide a link within a ticket if we want to (either for a whole ticket or on a per link basis). That way everyone gains.
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Hi Julie
IMHO the implementation of this isn't exactly optimal.
Apart from a small whitelist of sites (e.g. dropbox), all links are hidden by default.
We (supporters) when inserting a link can mark that it should be public, but, to be honest, we rarely remember to as it is unnatural if you are copying and pasting a link. That also doesn't help with older threads that already contained harmless links.
Let me discuss this with the support team leader.
I think all links posted by clients should be hidden, and all links posted by supporters should be public, unless specifically marked as private. That would fix the problem of links on older threads.
I'll see if he agrees and get back to you. (And thanks for the tip about the emails.)
...all links posted by supporters should be public, unless specifically marked as private
I hear what you say but there will be occasions when those links contain someone's domain name and I don't think the onus for selecting or decision about the link's display 'status' should reside with support staff; it should be with the ticket creator (domain owner).
I do agree it's not ideal and I totally get the bit about supporters not being able to easily remember to mark links as public if the content is already in the public domain. If links are public by default, we (ticket creators) have the ability to remove/rename our domain names (which works if the link is simply an example of code) and we can provide screenshots/upload a video to demonstrate an issue as opposed to a link if we don't want the domain to be published.
Thinking a bit out of the box, would it be possible to have a setting in our profiles where we could choose to have our domain names masked in the forum whilst making them visible to supporters and then all links could be public by default?
There was a simple reason for us to start masking some URL's on the public support forum - we had to remove clients tickets on a weekly basis because they shared some links (many times together with access credentials) and it was becoming unsustainable to maintain all that.
That said, we do have full control over what to show/hide and I don't mind making changes to what we mask if that's needed.
The best would be if you can please send me an email to amit.k@onthegosystems.com so we can discuss that together,
I'm happy to continue a discussion outside the forum and will drop you an email (it's a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK so I may not be in touch until early part of next week).
