FreeScout Gets Redmine-Style Conversation Links With JDNEER Relations 1.0

If you run a help desk on FreeScout, you know the feeling: three customers report the same outage, one ticket can't move until another is sorted out, and the only thing tying them together is your memory. JD's new module, JDNEER Conversation Relations, fixes that. Version 1.0.0 came out on October 15, and it brings Redmine-style links between conversations to FreeScout.

Five kinds of link

From a box in the conversation sidebar, you can mark a conversation as related to another, a duplicate of it, blocked by it, following it, or copied from it. Each link shows up from both sides, so "blocked by" on one conversation reads as "blocks" on the other, and "follows" reads as "precedes" (README).

The links do real work, too. A conversation that is blocked by an open one can't be closed. Admins can override that, or relax the rule to a simple warning. Closing an original also closes its open duplicates, and a conversation that follows another shows as waiting until the earlier one is done. Clone, New Conversation from a thread and Forward create links on their own, and merging two conversations keeps their links on the one that remains (release notes).

Built for shared installs

Out of the box, only conversations in the same mailbox can be linked. If one FreeScout serves several customers, link groups let you decide which mailboxes may link to each other, and a grid on the settings page under Manage, Settings, Relations shows the result at a glance. Agents only ever see the details of conversations they're allowed to open. Anything else shows up redacted (README, release notes).

In the conversation lists, badges flag linked and blocked conversations, and search gains filters for linked, blocked and relation type. The module comes with a guide for agents, a guide for admins and a how-it-works page for whoever maintains the install, all in plain words with screenshots (release notes).

It needs FreeScout 1.8.245 or later and no other module. It adds three tables of its own and writes nothing to FreeScout's tables apart from timeline entries and each mailbox's setting for hidden conversations. Deactivating it keeps all links and settings, and a "Remove all module data" option cleans everything up if you want it gone for good. The module is MIT licensed, and the zip comes with SHA256 and SHA512 checksums (README, release notes).

Themes get their own home

Alongside it, JDNEER Themes reached version 1.0.1. The themes themselves, Slate, Graphite, Nord, Mocha and Auto, which follows your system setting, are unchanged from 1.0.0. What changed is where the module lives: it now has its own repository, so updating is optional and touches no data. Both modules used to share a single bundle repository and have now been split out into their own, which makes each one easier to follow and update.