Feature request: Allow team members to "claim" a thread

Thanks!

For our use case, we'd only need to assign to a single person. The support staff is just me and two support engineers, so there aren't enough of us where it makes sense yet to have separate teams.

Collaborative editing would be cool, but it sounds like a lot of implementation complexity. We could get 95% of the benefit of collaborative editing if there was just some indicator that some other team member was drafting a reply and maybe when they last edited.

Support tickets are usually assigned to a single person, and we have private channels for discussion, so we wouldn't really need to collaboratively write responses like you would in a Google Doc. In other words, TalkYard could show the other moderators a note like, "Magnus is drafting a reply as of 3:04pm."

Status update: Now implemented, except for 1) notifications about someone having gotten assigned and 2) "sbd assigned sbd-else" meta comments, and 3) "deailed" permissions related to who-may-assign and who-can-see-who-has-gotten-assigned, but that can wait (I think).

Code review and auto tests missing, though, that's 2 weeks maybe ... (but 1 week more because of end-of-the-year bookkeeping :- / )

I agree. Seems this'll be available tomorrow in the hosted SaaS, and some days later in OSS release channel. (Initially without email notifications about having gotten assigned though — just started working on that.)

It would also be helpful if we had the ability to remove the topic "takeover" by other team members if we noticed that we would not be able to respond to a message anytime soon. Then another team member can take over the response, and we can avoid the long wait for a response.

That sounds as if a team member, should be able to freely change who-is-assigned to a topic? For example, co-worker X is on vacation, so I'll un-assign X, and assign myself instead? Or, I'll assign Y who knows all about that topic. — Sort of trusting one's team members to un/assign things in make sense ways? (Or am I misunderstanding something)

I'm thinking it'd be good if Core Members and Trusted Members, by default would be able to do that (in addition to mods & admins). Then, if you set your team members' trust level to Trusted or Core Member, the above would work.

(In the distant future, you'll be able to grant a user group (or "team"-of-co-workers) the permission to un/assign topics in specific categories, or the whole site. Then the Dev team can be responsible for assigning topics in a Development category, and a Marketing team, in a category about sales & marketing.)

Thanks for adding this, @KajMagnus!

I was able to discover the feature from the UI, but the current implementation requires a lot of work to assign a thread.

For context, using a tool like HelpScout, assigning a thread takes two clicks:

1. Click assign button
2. Click the assignee's name from a list of a few people

Currently, on TalkYard, assigning a thread takes 5 clicks and 3+ keystrokes:

1. Click "Change..."
2. Click "Assigned to:" -> "Change"
3. Click the "Select users" text field (which doesn't have focus by default)
4. Type the assignee's name because there are too many users in the dropdown
5. Click the matching name
6. Click "Add users"

I think there are a few quick wins that would drastically reduce the effort of assigning a thread:

• Could the list of assignable users be limited to moderators/admins?
  • Currently, there are only 3 users on my forum I'd want to assign a thread to, but the list currently includes hundreds of users. And it's so many that I have to type the name, which makes the process harder.
• Could the assignment be limited to a single user?
  • Being able to assign multiple users makes the UI a little more complicated than it needs to be.
• Could the assignment be an inline picklist similar to how we pick a category or topic type?
  • That would reduce it to just 3 clicks

(Without email notifications. I'm adding now, next version ...)

Would the email notification let the user know they've been assigned a thread? We actually wouldn't need that, as generally people self-assign. The reason we use it is to prevent two team members from working on a thread at once, so email wouldn't be necessary.