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Ask HN: Please review, contribute to, fork, or sell my open source Rails Help Desk app

36 points by callmeed ↗ HN
Hey HN gang,

I wanted to share my help desk app with you guys. I built it so our customers could submit help tickets and our staff could reply (this is a support app, not a bug tracking app).

Anyway, I decided to open source it and share with any startups that could benefit. I've learned a ton from HN over the last year, so this is the least I could do.

Right now, it's in beta(ish) but I will have a working demo and better docs before the weekend is over.

You can watch a quick preview here: http://vimeo.com/3299895

And get to the repo here: http://github.com/bigfolio/big-help/

At the moment, some of the content is specific to our business (we serve professional photographers). It's easy to change of course.

If anyone Rails hackers are interested in being a contributor, please let me know. If you want to fork it, sell it, or use it for consulting projects, knock yourself out.

Feedback is very much appreciated. I'll add a demo link here when available.

13 comments

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luminousbit
Looks extremely awesome and I'm excited to play with it! Definitely fills a need.
markup
I gave a look at the screencast and it looks pretty nice, I don't have much to suggest on that side.

However I went to github to give a peek at the code and I notice there's no LICENSE file (and I couldn't find any reference to the license anywhere obvious), so may I suggest picking one up? Technically you can't define your code Open Source unless you apply a proper license to it -- actually, I don't think anyone could legally use your code as of now, because even if you wanted it to be under the public domain, you should state it clearly (I could be wrong on this last statement, if so someone please correct me).

callmeed
Ah, true ... great point.

MIT License and updated README pushed.

jrockway
Very cool. I wish more people would submit "look at my open source project" articles; I like them a lot more than "review my half-baked startup".

Plus, if there's something I don't like, I can fix it instead of complaining about it. Much better for everyone ;)

swombat
I would suggest you start the screencast by showing how a real helpdesk staff would use it to solve a ticket more quickly with your system than with just email or their brain. That would help sell it, imho.
callmeed
Will do, thanks.

Do you think a project like this should have its own site? (aside from what's on github)

I personally don't have a ton of time to implement features beyond what we need at our company. Plus, I really only consider myself an intermediate Rails developer.

thesethings
Yeah, I think it'd be great + pretty standard for this to have its own site. I love Github, but sometimes I get bummed when it's a projects only site, because it doesn't give a good "at a glance" feel for what the software does. I totally understand if you don't whip one up overnight, though ;D
oscardelben
Having its own site will help non programmers to find your product. These people normally will need setup assistance so you could also charge extra money for this.
callmeed
Here's a demo of the app as-is: http://helpdemo.bigfolio4.com/ USER: helper PASS: secret (login link for staff is in the footer)

I'm working on a good list of bugs/features right now (emailing ticket alerts/updates is not in yet), so please be gentle :)

Also, I should probably fork/branch a version that doesn't have the fields/links specific to our company. I'm still wrapping my head around github though.

callmeed
Just pushed email features last night. Supports file attachments too.
JayHa
Awesome, Good job man, keep this up i like it when people put up projects like this on HN.
JayHa
BTW, callmeed do you have contact info like email for yourself?
callmeed
Should be in my profile ... or at erikdungan.com