Zendesk now powering True Knowledge’s Forum and Help Desk

Around one in every twenty (logged in) visits to True Knowledge results in a user submitting feedback through the site's feedback box.  So we've been getting a lot feedback each day and up till now haven't been as good as we could at responding to messages, due mostly to a lack of a decent feedback management system.

That ends today as True Knowledge is now using Zendesk (a software-as-a-service helpdesk application) to manage, respond and track feedback we receive from users.

From now on, when you submit feedback your message will become a private ticket in our new helpdesk and we will track your ticket and respond to you from there.

Zendesk is also now powering our new forum which gives us many advantages over our previous solution.  We now have RSS feeds available for the whole forum, the individual forums and each discussion thread.  The look and feel of the forum is also far nicer than before and the bug that was preventing many users from accessing our old forum has now gone.

The one downside to this change is that we must start over with a fresh new forum.  We felt that the sacrifice would be worth it in the long run and we have kept the old forum alive (here) so you can browse historic posts but if you want to make a post you must use the new forum powered by Zendesk.

Comments

[Equanimous]

This is great news.

But there is a small problem !
The rss feeds is password protected. Maybe you should just let everybody read the feeds.

[Nick Franklin]

Hi Equanimous,

Glad you like the news. The rss feeds aren't meant to be password protected and I can't seem to reproduce this problem. I have tried logging in with a normal (non-admin) account and I didn't have a problem.

Is there a message that says the feeds are password protected? If so would you mind pasting it into a comment.

Thanks

Nick

[Equanimous]

Try not logging in at all.

With wget I get
>wget http://support.trueknowledge.com/posts.rss
--23:27:16-- http://support.trueknowledge.com/posts.rss
=> `posts.rss'
Resolving support.trueknowledge.com... 65.74.185.41
Connecting to support.trueknowledge.com|65.74.185.41|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 401 Unauthorized
Authorization failed.

[Nick Franklin]

Ah yes I see what you mean; RSS is completely useless as the whole thing is behind the True Knowledge private beta login process (sorry quite stupid of me).

I just looked and this isn't something I can fix quickly so I'll take a look at it when I'm in the office tomorrow and let you know.

Thanks a lot for reporting this.

Nick

[Equanimous]

Thanks it is working now.

[John S]

Zendesk seems pretty good. We use HelpSpot http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/ and are very happy with it as well.

[Nick Franklin]

On Friday I wrote a script to import all the forum posts from our old forum (which was based on phpbb) into our new Zendesk hosted forum.

I just finished running the script so you'll notice that the forums are now looking a lot fuller.