This is a really cool feature! I have extensive experience working with support tickets (both professionally and on forums) so I've definitely come to view it as a critical aspect of any service or community. There are many reasons for this, but two among them are scalability and cooperative workflow facilitation. In short, as a forum (or any site) grows, it becomes unrealistic for support efforts to center around more direct webmaster to end user communication via email, private messaging and so on. A support ticketing system can make it easier to sort and organize issues, analyze data and observe trends across many users and periods of time. Furthermore, due to the varied nature of support requests from end users there are often varying departments of specialization needed to handle the inquiry efficiently (for example, a site may appoint different individuals to specialize in handling billing/financial inquiries vs. technical inquiries).
Just to check, did you install the help center feature from this mod?
https://mods.mybb.com/view/help-center
I downloaded the mod locally and looked through the source code a bit -- looks like this has a lot of great features. Now I'm not that familiar with mybb modding specifically, but assuming there is some degree of flexibility with such things I'd definitely recommend developing the following features if they are not already included:
For Help Center Managers- Access tiers with granular permission allocation (e.g. Administrators have full access, Super Moderators have limited access -- useful for compartmentalization of departments and workflow)
- Private departments/support ticket categories (e.g. end user can view and select categories from set A, while set B contains categories only viewable by Administrators + any permitted staff groups -- useful for Tier 2 support elevated beyond front-line assistance, internal projects/tracking, etc)
- Ability to merge/split tickets (e.g. if a user sends a reply to their ticket about a different issue, you can split it into a new ticket, or if a user sends a 2nd ticket in about the same issue, you can merge them into a single ticket)
- Secure integration of support interface with administrative functions (e.g. a data panel for staff to view quick information inline with the ticket such as user's email address, IP address at the time of ticket submission, account creation date, moderation status and history, etc -- as well as quick-access tools like ban account, blacklist from sending support requests, mark account as spammer, delete all forum posts -- for added security instead of initiating the function from the ticket interface itself, the function could be quicklinked inline with the ticket interface but when clicked would open a new tab initiating standard authentication and security protocols as if the feature had been accessed directly from a standard moderation tool interface/mod panel/admin panel)
- Private notes feature, allowing multiple support staff to leave notes on a ticket viewable by staff but not by the end user, useful for complex tickets that require interdepartmental collaboration
- Ability to lock down the priority of a ticket and/or blacklist the user from changing priority (useful for anyone who attempts to abuse the priority-altering system in place)
- Automatic parsing through the VirusTotal API of any links and files submitted by the end user, reducing the risk of bad actors submitting malicious and/or deceptive content
- An interstitial warning page when clicking external links to help guard against social engineering attacks
- A spam filter on support tickets to automatically block anything detected as containing highly dangerous links or files, notifying the Administrators about the attempted action but preventing it from successfully creating a ticket in the help center
For End Users- Ability to close their own ticket if their issue was resolved (would require inputting a reason for logging purposes)
- Notifications pushed to CluckAlert and/or email in addition to PM if the user so chooses (defined in account notification settings)
- Ability to link their support tickets together. For example, if they sent in a ticket, had their issue resolved so ticket closed, and then a few months later they experience the same issue again, when creating a new ticket they could utilize a field to backlink to the old one, making it easier for support staff to quickly access the full context of the matter at hand
- Ability to include image or video attachments inline or at the end of their support ticket
In conclusion I'm very happy to see this feature and I think it's a great thing to have as time goes on. I'm also pleased to see the inclusion of Help Docs, as it's always good to provide users with self-help information at the same stage wherein they feel the need to contact support staff, as that can help users find resolutions more quickly and also reduce ticket volume.
To help encourage use of the system, I definitely recommend advertising/linking the feature wherever feasible (in automated emails sent by the forum, in pinned threads, on rules/TOS/contact pages, etc).