Does someone know a module for tickets credit/charge?

[yggdrasil]

Does someone know a module from a proper WHMCS developer or a serious company that allows you to charge for tickets in a specific support department?

 

I don't need anything fancy, all I need is to be able to restrict users without credits from opening a ticket in one department or charge them from their credits once they do.

 

Sounds simple right? Well I could not find a proper solution yet.

 

Or could I accomplish something similar with the API/hooks maybe?

 

Example, users selects department:

 

Warning prior opening a ticket that the user will be charged. He clicks ok.

 

Opens the ticket, if he has credits, it opens the ticket. If not, it closes it automatically with a canned reply informing the reason or blocks the ticket from entering completely.

Edited October 5, 2014 by yggdrasil

[brian!]

there's a module from ModulesGarden that allows you to charge for support tickets...

 

http://www.modulesgarden.com/products/whmcs/support_tickets_limiter/features

[adroitssd]

You can use vision helpdesk.

[Kian]

We're using this kind of system on our new websites. We have 3 different support sections:

 

• Standard support: free, normal priority
  
• Premium support: client pays X € to open a ticket with highest priority. We answer him even on week end and holydays almost immediately
  
• Report incident: we all know that when there's something offline or not working it's very important to check things as soon as possible. Sadly with the standard features of WHMCS you have all tickets (sales, normal support and incidents) treated on the same level. We then added a "Report incident" section where clients, before submitting the ticket, have to tick a checkbox to "agree that you will charge me X € if the incident that I'm reporting is not an incident or it's not due to our responsibilities". We have a page on back-end when we can review all open incidents and flag them as "incident" or "fake" and automatically apply fees.
  
• 
  

Edited October 5, 2014 by Kian

[yggdrasil]

What Kian posted is more or less what I had in the past.

 

I also have something similar to Standard free, Premium (paid) and Report I actually call it Critical Incident but its the same thing.

 

I have a Kayako license around which I used in the past but to be honest I don't want that.

 

I don't want to use an external ticket system again. I like WHMCS ticket systems because its tightly integrated with customer accounts. When I used Kayako in the past I lost so much time going back between interfaces or having WHMCS open since most of the tickets evolve around looking some information on the customer side, like invoices, products, or past tickets. Not to mention it was buggy and integration with external systems never don't work as expected and in the best case its just a basic link connection. My tickets needs are not advanced either.

 

I like the WHMCS ticket system. Its simple, it could receive more love in terms of features but I would prefer to handle this directly in WHMCS, since its going to be related to credit/or billing, then it makes even more sense to use the integrated WHMCS system.

 

I purchased (sadly) the Modules Garden Ticket product they advertise for sale. It never worked. I spend my money for nothing since it completely destroyed the ticket functionality in WHMCS when enabled. Users could not open any tickets anymore and the module killed all errors messages/warnings as well, example, you could upload an incorrect attachment and there was no warning, you could fill an incorrect captcha or leave a field blank and there was no error, the user had zero clues why the ticket was not sending, not to mention it only worked for users that had credits assigned manually. So the product was buggy and its over 2 months now and they can't fix it. So I'm looking for something that actually works.

 

Of course if I can tweak WHMCS myself I would prefer that vs a module which has great chances of killing something or making WHMCS buggy. The less off modules I can be, the better, since external third party codes cannot be reviewed and usually lack the quality testing and support WHMCS has.

[yggdrasil]

there's a module from ModulesGarden that allows you to charge for support tickets...

 

http://www.modulesgarden.com/products/whmcs/support_tickets_limiter/features

 

It never worked since release, version 1.0.0

 

I was probably the only person that purchased the module it seems, otherwise they would have more complaints already. Not even sure why they still list it on their website for sale if its not working and they confirmed me it does not work. Its 2 months so I gave up on them.

Edited October 5, 2014 by yggdrasil

[Kian]

The reason why I started to develop things all by myself years ago on WHMCS is that the world is full of programmers who are not specialized with WHMCS. They make software equals to a pile of ... something because they don't even know its framework. I worked for a lot of Providers using WHMCS and you can't imagine how many shitty softwares I've seen in my life. One day I even saw a "module" loading an incredibly huge and massive external library (18 MB and so damned slow and logging every single query and results in txt files) just to query the database while you just needed to use the existing connection of WHMCS. It was so idiotic. The rest of the module was all about incredibly inefficient hacks and workarounds to achive simple goals. I don't know what's wrong with these guys when they think "Who cares about frameworks and documentation? Let's start to write something procedural".

 

About ModulesGarden I personally don't use any of their modules because I think that they develop awesome modules on paper. In fact I find that most of their modules are incomplete or not viable in production environment. There's always something missing that have to be added separately paying them for extra-development. I suppose that creating modules that need additional development is part of their business model. Secondly I don't like the fact that with time they developed a sort of proprietary framework that works on WHMCS one. It's too messy. I also don't like that it seems that they don't care about creating modules with an appearance in line with WHMCS. It's like having red shoes on full black smoking.

 

Sorry for the long post but I agree with you. My suggestion is: develop it by yourself or pay someone you can trust. There's no point in waiting for WHMCS to add, maybe one day, this feature. Trust me, if you have the knowledge of WHMCS, you need few days to complete it. If you want I can show you how we made it on our website. Clients can open tickets in a specific department only if they have enough credit on their account. If their credit balance is not sufficient we ask them to add funds. If they can open the ticket we immediately charge them as soon as they open it and eventually also generate the invoice still automatically. You simply need to make you script working with API + Action hooks.

Edited October 5, 2014 by Kian

[yggdrasil]

Well I agree with you. I think their whole business model is around building incomplete things, and then asking extra for custom development. Its funny you mention that because that is what they replied when I reported some bugs and even security issues in the past. They tend to say those are extra features they can build for custom development. I read more than one people saying that before.

 

Honestly, if they need money why don't they just charge more for their modules instead and deliver something incomplete? On one part WHMCS is at fault for all the crappy modules that are around the web because usually nobody would pay more for a module than what the whole software costs. This is a problem with WHMCS, their product is cheap and so their user base is cheap and developers cannot charge properly for their modules. Strangely there are companies and users that would pay the prices they ask if this where professional modules build with proper support. Modules Garden seems to be the most serious one so far (sadly) and this is why people buy their modules, they also offer the source code which is nice for companies that want to review the code before putting some third party code into their systems. That is a nice touch. But I agree with you and also on the part where they don't maintain WHMCS looks which looks rather amateur. Modules for WHMCS should feel and work like WHMCS, not with different colors or a different interface.

 

I appreciate your feedback and I'm not sure if you develop things for your own use alone or for selling, but I could not find WHMCS services in your website. Is this something you build for internal use only? From your reply it seems something like this can be done without having to hack or modify WHMCS database, but rather using API and hooks. If that is possible that is better than changing how the core software works.

 

If you have something build that works in your company, then you should really consider maybe creating modules for WHMCS as well for an extra income because it would be nice to have more companies doing things on top of WHMCS.

[brian!]

It never worked since release, version 1.0.0

 

I was probably the only person that purchased the module it seems, otherwise they would have more complaints already. Not even sure why they still list it on their website for sale if its not working and they confirmed me it does not work. Its 2 months so I gave up on them.

I just spotted your comment in the thread about it not working - apologies as I should have seen that before posting the link!

 

i'm glad that you did post your comments and other module buyers should be encouraged more to make comments about their purchases (good, bad or indifferent) in the appropriate threads or appstore discussion - though ideally any discussion about a module should be centralised in one place, and not occurring in multiple places!

 

i've seen similar comments about ModulesGarden modules before too... though i've never used any of their modules myself.

[Kian]

...

Well the website in my signature is not the main one. I mean it works but I work full time as WHMCS/Magento developer (I'm trying to stop with Magento... I want to keep my life beautiful) and prevalently "offline" in the sense that I haven't a website about developing stuff. I did a lot of things for WHMCS for several companies and they pay me to keep all code private so that they can even resell my modules on this website with their brands.

 

Anyway it's about 8 months that I'm trying to finish my ***dream project*** on WHMCS so probably in next few months I'll be finally able to publish something. If you want I can give you login credentials to this website where you can find and try the ticket functionality that you are looking for. There are several more other things of course (big ones ) but it's not the point of the thread. I'll open a new one for suggestions when I manage to find time to record a video about all cloud model (it works with single websites, VPS, game and voice servers), credit based, real time graphs and billing stuff that I'm doing on WHMCS.