Simulating a ticketing system from home, while helping real people!

The Plan

Greetings everyone, I hope you are all having a lovely day. I am writing on this blog yet again to update you on my projects that I am working on and continue to want to revisit as I expand on some subtle complexities to make them more extravagant, but mainly to grab some more exposure to various technologies across a variety of platforms.

Today’s post is about how I had the idea to respond to community threads to help users and provide some typical IT Support, except in this case, these were primarily just posts on the internet, a cry for help to a situation, rather, and not entered through a formal ticketing system, as these are just normal people. And then, this is what began my bright ideas.

Reddit Drama

So, originally, I had visited this project by responding to various subreddits, and of course as you may know, as of this past few months of the midst of 2023, Reddit has made some interesting choices regarding their API access. They changed it from free to paid, which is understandable as businesses need to make some sort of financial sense, but they had increased it to a price which is sort of unreasonable, in a very little time period, with only a 30 day time limit to let 3rd parties change their applications to adopt the new policies packaged with the API changes. Now, this is background context that will prove importance later, but for now, let’s just focus on the subreddit part.

The First Attempt

I had this idea that I’d consider original, though there may be others who have attempted something similar, but I would go on various technical subreddits where users were inquiring about issues and looking for resolution. Anywhere from r/networking, r/techhelp, r/techsupport, and things of that nature. I then aggregated all these subreddits’ RSS feed into a RSS reader, and I would look for various issues that I felt confident that I could assist in. At the time, I wanted to simulate a real ticketing environment, but I was having trouble finding suitable software and I had not had my Proxmox server configured yet so I had not spun anything up to that effect. Instead, I would take note of the user, the issue, and my response, document it all in a markdown file, and I would also replicate that information over to an excel spreadsheet. I would color code each issue in the table whether it was ongoing, resolved, or closed. I then had around 26 users in the first few days that I had attempted to help. This was the proof of concept phase.

The Wheels are Turning..

Now, at a base level, I thought this was pretty cool. I got to help real world people, and I was able to get some experience troubleshooting issues that weren’t from my own causation. It’s always really fulfilling for me to get problems solved that make people’s lives easier, and I felt very motivated to continue this. However, remember, I had been using a weird way of documenting things that wasn’t all that automated and I would consider it a bit time consuming to format every issue efficiently, documenting it in a excel sheet.

This is when I had another bright idea, and this is where my developments begin with this project, as this is ongoing so I will definitely update this post as I get new insights, with the appropriate dates for each update period so, historically, you can track where I was in this, and learn from my mistakes.

The Bright Idea.

Imagine if I could log the Reddit posts to some kind of open source ticketing system, deployed on a Proxmox virtual machine or Docker container, then it could call the Reddit API, which maybe I missed my boat on with the free version, versus the outrageous API prices per action, and after it calls the API and stores the post inside the ticket system, I could officially refer to the post as a ticket; granted, the user who posted it wouldn’t even know all this is going on in the backend, but, I would be able to reply to the user, maybe some advanced scripting is my vision, and it would allow the ticket to progress until things are resolved. Each user would have their own “profile” and I would try to find software close enough to simulate a real world organization that would be solving tickets for clients in the real world.

The advantage to all this is, well, I would create the script, which would build my Python scripting skills, I would learn about how to implement the Reddit API, and I would be making everyone’s day better by pitching in from annoying things that cause us trouble in our day to day with our advanced “smart” technology that is “not so smart” sometimes even though (sometimes it can be user error, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt). But, this to me was an epiphany when I had thought of it, because it takes this simple project and expands on it tremendously.

This is the game plan and I’ll be sure to update you all as I get progress on this.

The Update, Did It Work?

To be announced!