Dev blog 04/05/2018 - Tickets, addon teams and knowledge bases

Dev blog 04/05/2018

In this dev blog I will be going over changes to the support ticket system, the addon knowledge bases, the new addon teams and a little bit about the new addon submission system.

Addon teams

The first thing content creators will notice when the new update comes out is that addons are no longer owned by a single user. They're owned by a team. This is a change we've made for several reasons, one is because it's easier from a legal document standpoint to refer to a single entity (i.e a team) instead of several authors.

The addon teams are automatically generated by us as we switch to the next version of GmodStore. They are based on the current authors of an addon and their cut %. If they have the same across multiple addons and the authors are the same, then they will share a single team all the way. The team owner is the primary author of the addon.

Another reason is so that addons can actually be transferrable. That's right! You can transfer addons between teams you are a member of. The commission rate is based on the team owner's total revenue. This also means that not only can you transfer addons, but you can also transfer teams.

When submitting an addon you are also greeted with a dropdown to select a team to assign the addon to. You also have the option to "Create new team" upon addon submission if you don't fancy creating a team beforehand. This is also because as I mentioned in the previous dev blog, regular users will not have access to the dashboard area at all. When you submit an addon now it does not automatically submit itself for review, you can now change other settings regarding addons and upload media and more before submitting it up for review. Addon reviewing is now done in a submission ticket instead of the creator discussion area on an addon.

Addon specific knowledge bases

Some much requested features for addons include their own knowledge base that works like a small wiki that you or another team member with sufficient access can manage. There's also a feature to display a message to all customers before they submit a ticket. This is in addition to the knowledge base being forced upon the user at least twice before they submit a ticket.

In your addon's knowledge base users get the ability to search, a list of popular topics and a list of categories that you can sort as you wish. As I mentioned in the previous dev blog, just ignore the header image as it isn't final. You can create help categories and choose their colour and font awesome icon. Help topics use our new editor that allows for embedding of youtube videos, vimeo videos, spotify songs as well as twitter tweets automatically.

Support ticket submission

When submitting a support ticket as a user now you get two options. Either addon support or site support. When you click on an addon you are brought to this screen:

Here you can see the message you specified earlier as well as a link to the addon knowledge base, and if that isn't enough you also get this popup when trying to submit the ticket:

This should hopefully make you think twice before submitting a ticket. Most of the time your issue can be solved by a quick glance at the knowledge base.

Support tickets for creators

The ticket view for addon creators now has a bunch of new options including filtering by subject, addon, tags, closed, open or all tickets. The more interesting stuff however happen in the ticket view itself:

On the right hand side you can see that you now have new options including labels and quick replies. A quick reply is a pre defined reply that you can define for each addon. This helps you use even less time replying to tickets if the response is really generic.

Labels are also pretty cool:

As you can see you can create labels on the fly in the ticket view itself, and assign them without any hassle. If you have ever used Github you are already familiar with how these labels work.

To edit a label you click the edit label button and you get brought to a page listing all the labels for this addon, where you can easily edit, delete or create a new label

A familiar interface for anyone who has ever used Github.

There's one more new thing about tickets that you might have noticed from the customer ticket creation screenshot, you can now upload attachments.

After uploading a file it's listed on the right hand side along with quick replies and labels:

Another enhancement we've made that isn't particularly a huge new feature is code highlighting,

This is super helpful to quickly spot an issue in a mess of a paragraph that someone might send you, provided they actually use the code block feature.

This is the second dev blog of a few more to come, even though this dev blog is big there is a lot more to share regarding addons and the marketplace itself. In the next dev blog I might share more about the new jobs system and how it works.

Keep replies civil. Questions and feedback is okay, but flaming or spamming is not.