Good day!

Tender provides an extras key to be set on users through the API or using SSO. It is copied to the discussion when it is created. We just deployed a small change, and the extras hash will now appear on all discussions this user created, and present the latest information. If the current information is different than the one recorded on the discussion, you’ll see a small warning sign that you can click:

Showing the orignal information

This should make this block even more useful :)

Also, attachments are now embedded in notification emails for Lighthouse.

Cheers!

Howdy everyone,

Just a quick note to let you know that Tender now include attachments directly in comment notification emails if the total size is less than 10mo. If it’s more it will stick to links.

Enjoy!

Howdy!

It’s been a while since our last blog post, but today I have something exciting for you: HTML emails are now the default in Tender. This means that emails to your users will look cleaner, AND you can use Markdown to create nice looking responses (or echo templates):

We’ve also improved the notifications for staff:

Autoresponders have been upgraded as well, go try to create one!

You can find more information about how to customize your email templates on our knowledge base article.

Cheers!

It’s probably not a huge surprise that we use Lighthouse integration with our own Tender support (and Lighthouse support too). Using both applications lets our support team escalate issues to our developers that might need a little more time and attention. It’s particularly awesome because support staff can set the discussion aside but as soon as the Lighthouse ticket is closed the Tender discussion will be bumped back to pending dashboard.

Integration can be an incredible enhancement to your support workflow and is so simple, you’ll be up and running in no time. Check out the knowledge base article to get started - https://help.tenderapp.com/kb/general-use/how-do-i-integrate-my-tender-with-lighthouse. We also offer integration with Github Issues.

*Tender customers who are subscribed to a paid Lighthouse plan receive 15% off of their Tender account.  So what are you waiting for!? Sign up today and make sure to contact us at billing@tenderapp.com so we know to apply that discount for you.

We have been experimenting with a new method of generating stylesheets for Tender sites, and this is the result: Tender Themes.

While we’ve always offered custom CSS on some plans (And we still do! Upgrade today!), this approach offers a much lower barrier to entry compared to building a complete custom stylesheet for your Tender. We’ve also reduced the range of colors in the palette (can you believe we had 14 different ‘dark blue’s?) and we do some tricky color math so that you only need to choose a few core colors to get a nice looking theme.

While theming in Tender can currently only be used to change colors, this is only the beginning! In the fullness of time, anything that can be controlled via CSS can theoretically be controlled with a Tender theme. We hope to expand this capability in the future. If you have specific suggestions to help theming meet your needs, let us know! We’ve provided a few built-in themes to get you started, but we encourage you to experiment with this new feature, make your own themes.

Color theming is immediately available to all Tender sites.

Like a lot of companies who make and support web-based applications, the concept of a having a physical workspace/office isn’t really critical to the work we do. We could all be working remotely, from far flung areas of the world…only wi-fi required.

So, why Portland? For me at least, the answer is clear:

Beer.

Wait. Just let me make my case.

We can all agree, developers shake their fists at bugs far less when said fists are holding pints of beer, and baby, we got all sorts of beers.

We have a few things going for us here in Portland. Namely, hops. They grow in our backyard. As a result a Pacific Northwest IPA should really smack you in the mouth with flavor. An Oregon IPA should wind-up cold-cock your mouth with flavor. Basically, in Oregon, your face is in danger. When you live here for awhile you can even start to get snobby about the types of hops they put in the beer *.

Access to the variety of fresh hops is something really unique about this corner of the world and makes our beer really something great.

Another thing special about the Portland beer scene is the sheer concentration of breweries in the city limits. With 30+ breweries, we live in a city that can support an entire brewery dedicated to sour beer. Let me put this in perspective. Sour beer (really sour beer) tastes like someone just poured a bunch of vinegar in your beer. It’s an acquired taste to say the least. There’s an entire brewery dedicated to vinegar beer and we love it. Portland brewers compete and take risks. The winner of this competition is without a doubt our greedy faces.

If all of the locally brewed beer wasn’t enough, Portland also gets amazing regional brews from Washington, California and Colorado. Portland sits at a crossroad in the middle of all the great West coast beer.

Here are a few of our team’s favorites:

Tsunami Stout… roasty, malty goodness - Nicole

I think my preferred beer is the Sierra Nevada Porter. I’ve always been a fan of dark beers and this Porter manages to offer a rich taste while still feeling light and smooth. It leaves you satisfied without feeling overwhelmed, and it’s flavorful and crisp. A good introduction to the world of Porters. - Julien

My favorite beer-drinking experience is English-style bitters from a cask. Unfortunately ESB is not the most popular style in Portland. Luckily Rogue Brewery in the Pearl district always has Young’s Special Bitters on cask when I get that urge. - Hobson

I absolutely love Laurelwood Workhorse IPA. It’s hoppy, floral, full-bodied and smooth. Ugh. It’s so damn good. - Amanda

* I am totally snobby about the types of hops they put in the beer

The first 2 weeks of October were rough. As many of you noticed, search was requiring a refresh or two to work – and sometimes didn’t work at all for a while. Search is a big part of customer support: you need to know if other people have had similar issues to the one you are responding to, find other discussions from the same user, point users back to older discussions or KB articles solving their problems. In short: search is essential.

So when our search engine started misbehaving, we immediately started investigating what was going on to fix it as fast as possible. The machines in the search cluster were running out of memory, requiring regular restart of the search engine. This caused troubles because the search engine was not available while it was restarting and re-initializing, but also responding poorly as it was reaching the limits of the machine. We added more machines and more memory almost immediately to at least alleviate the problem and keep search generally usable, but no matter how big the machine, the server would always run out of memory. It thus became clear that something else needed to be done.

The reason of this sudden memory hunger was a corruption in the index. We repaired the index a few times, but this didn’t seem to fix it, and so we had to create a brand new index, on new servers, to come back to a stable state. In the process, we made several changes to the way our index is structured: where previously all sites were part of one big bucket, we isolated all sites on the new index, which means that search and indexing are much faster. Also, if issues arise on one site, other sites are less likely to be affected, and we can work on that site specifically.

During this whole time, we worked almost 24/7 to keep things running and to build the new infrastructure. Tender is now running on this new index, on very powerful machines, and search is working properly and fast. We still have to iron out a few things, and work will continue during the next few days, but you shouldn’t notice any problems and we’ll do the maximum to make those changes without any downtime. If you notice anything wrong (search unavailable, missing discussions or KB articles), let us know as soon as you can so we can jump on it.

Right now everything is looking good and we’ll keep improving things, but if you have any question or problem, drop us a line at help@tenderapp.com, and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

Thanks for your support and your patience. You are the greatest customers one can hope for. We love Tender, and we’ll continue to do our best to bring you the best customer experience possible, both as staff and clients.

Cheers.

We are excited to announce our participation in the launch of the Geckoboard Widget Editor, part of the Geckoboard Developer Platform. Geckoboard creates software that make it easy for businesses to see all of their key metrics on elegant, real-time, business dashboards.

During the last couple of months we’ve being working with the team at Geckoboard to develop a set of widgets to monitor key metrics important to Lighthouse Customers and we are incredibly happy with the results. For the very first time our customers can now see their important Lighthouse metrics together with their other metrics on one Geckoboard dashboard.

The Lighthouse widgets enable our customers to display number of open and closed tickets in a project, RAG status of projects and total number of open tickets across all projects. For a complete list of the Lighthouse widgets available, check out the details - Lighthouse Widgets on Geckoboard

To see some of the Lighthouse Widgets in action check out this sample dashboard

To see your Lighthouse details on a Geckoboard dashboard, sign up for a Free 30 day trial and get your own business dashboard http://www.geckoboard.com. If you think of any widgets we should add, just let us know at help@lighthouseapp.com.

Did you know you can split a customer’s discussion into two or more separate discussions? Well, you can with our Split Discussion feature. The ability to split discussions can come in handy for a variety of reasons, from security maintenance to basic organization.  Because let’s face it: people goof up and so do you.

Say User A writes in with a question which you believe contains private information, yet they’ve left the discussion as public. Between the time the discussion came in and the time it took for you to respond, User B comes along, experiencing a similar issue, and chimes in on this public discussion. You wouldn’t want User B seeing User A’s private information, so you could then split the discussion in two. User A gets answered in a separate discussion which would be made private, while User B gets answered in a new discussion, either public or private, depending upon the subject-voila! Split Discussions! Read more in our knowledge base article on Splitting Discussions.

Now for heartbeats.  When you’re setting up your Tender, it’s a good idea to make sure your email delivery is up and running correctly. Heartbeats verify that email delivery to your Tender site is working. They’re enabled by default for new sites, but not everyone has them turned on. When enabled, Heartbeats help add more information to our health stats which help us diagnose problems faster when they come up. Help keep Tender healthy-start using heartbeats! Read more in our knowledge base article on Heartbeats.

Queues are a powerful and flexible way to manage your support load with Tender. In some ways, Queues work a bit like tagging — any individual discussion can be in multiple queues, so you can use them for everything from tracking common issues to grouping discussions by feature, or team, or even assigning discussions to individuals — or all of them at once.

Create a Queue

To create a Queue, go to your Dashboard and click the “Manage Queues” link on the bottom of the left-hand navigation bar. Simply click the “Create Queue” button to add a Queue with the name you can specify.

Assign a Discussion to a Queue

In the header of every discussion’s page, you can assign it to a Queue simply by clicking the “ADD TO QUEUE” button in the header — if it’s already in any Queues, it will tell you how many Queues the discussion is in.

Automatically Assign Discussions to Queues using Filters

You can use a filter to automatically assign a Discussion to a specific Queue. Simply go to your dashboard and click “Account & Settings” from the header, then click “Settings.” On the Settings page, select “Discussion Filters” from the left side nav bar. The total number of filters you can add depends on your particular plan’s settings. An example of a filter could be if there is a text match for API, it automatically adds the discussion to the API and Developers Queues.

Manage Subscriptions

You can use queues to assign discussions to team groups or individuals, simply by having them subscribe on their User Account page under Email Subscriptions. This allows team members to be focused only on discussions that are relevant to their expertise without having to search through all Open or Pending discussions for items they should be responding to.

Are you using Queues in particularly inventive ways? Drop us a line at help@tenderapp.com and we’ll be happy to hear how you set up Queues to work for you!