How To Place A Free Support Ticket System On Your Blog

July 15th, 2008 Amir Posted in Website tips | 1 Comment »

Thanks, but I’ve got enough Viagra to last a life-time.
No more offers please!

Any blogger who has tried to facilitate communications with their readership by including an email address on their pages has quickly discovered that their inbox is filled with endless fake Rolex pitches, Viagra solicitations, X-rated site links, Get Rich Quick Schemes, and other junk spam email. Even if the link is not shown on the page itself, it is present in the HTML page as a mailto: and thus is vulnerable to the bots that crawl the web seeking out email addresses for spam lists.


Some bloggers are placing their email addresses in a modified format such as:

myname (at) mymail (dot) com

or

myname-@-mymail-.-com

Some may also choose to use a spamblock, which is an email address that has been modified by the insertion of an additional word, such as SPAMBLOCK or NOSPAM, such as

myNOSPAMname@mymail.com

The problem with spamblocks is that the spammers’ latest bots and spiders have learned those tactics and will seek out the email addresses that have been spamblocked and just strip the supplementary word out of them. They will do the same with many of the most popular ways of altering emails by subsituting (at) for @, and (dot) for . It seems that no matter what steps you take to keep an email address off a spam list, there is a programmer somewhere who is one step ahead of you.

It’s obvious that placing your email address in any form on your blog page is just asking for trouble, so many bloggers are turning to contact forms. Utilizing a contact form not only lends an air of professionalism to your blog, but also bypasses the entire email address conundrum. There are various existing scripts and forms such as the WordPress form to be found at deliciousdays. These forms are easy to link to and use, but some create conflicts with other plug ins, and may not be available for popular blogging platforms such as TypePad or Blogger.com.

Many bloggers utilize a contact page but that creates a problem that all comments become public and it requires the poster to keep checking that page to see if they get a reply, if ever.

These various problems are avoided by implementing the Support Ticket System by ICanLocalize (see a 5 minute how-to integrate guide). Not only is it completely free to use, but it circumvents all of the shortcomings that make the other blogger contact methods so troublesome.

A Support Ticket System is a private and effective way to create a comprehensive thread of messages containing all of a specific visitor’s communication with a blogger. This thread is permanently accessible, and instantly updated whenever any new messages between you are posted.

From the visitor’s standpoint, they enter their information on what seems to be a fairly conventional contact form. They soon receive an autoresponder reply instructing them as how their messages will be handled and to expect a response, ensuring that your messages don’t get relegated to the Junk Mail Folder.

Whenever a visitor completes a form, the blogger receives an email with the pertinent information. The facilities of the Support Ticket System allow the blogger to organize the tickets by category, search within tickets and select pending tickets to reply to or close off.

Support Ticket Systems are the tried and true method to ensure maximum and efficient communication with a blogger’s readership while preventing headaches on both sides. There has never been a system as advanced, practical and completely free as the one offered by ICanLocalize, and any blogger who is concerned about maximizing readership satisfaction should implement it on their pages.