Helpdesk Reporters
In the context of a helpdesk project, a "reporter" refers to the individual who submits or raises a request or issue to the helpdesk system. This could be an end user, a customer, or someone within the organization seeking assistance or reporting a problem. The reporter provides details about the issue or request, which the helpdesk team then addresses.
One of the major difference between a helpdesk project and a standard project for issue tracking is that helpdesk projects support an unlimited number of free licenses for reporters, whereas a standard issue-tracking project requires a standard license for every user.
There are several possible scenarios for working with a helpdesk project that can change the definition of what it means to be a reporter in this context. For example:
Your IT department uses YouTrack to handle purchase requests for new equipment as well as requests for service and repair. The IT support specialists have agent licenses and everyone else in your organization has access to YouTrack as a reporter.
Your product team has a group of dedicated customer support representatives who have been granted agent licenses in YouTrack. They respond to inquiries from anyone who buys your product. These are typically people who are not members of your organization and are only able to access your YouTrack site as reporters.
You sell a product to the public that is also used internally by other members of your organization. You have a team of support engineers with agent licenses who handle incoming complaints. However, the group of reporters in this scenario includes people who are internal to your organization as well as members of the public.
There are also cases where one or more of these scenarios are combined, like when you have a group of agents who provide customer support for a product, but are considered reporters when submitting their own support requests to the IT team.
Reporter Account Creation
One of the major differences between a reporter and a standard user or agent account is the way they are created in YouTrack.
Standard user and agent accounts are either created directly by system administrators or by sending users invitations to register their own accounts in YouTrack.
Reporters are created automatically any time a user who does not already have a YouTrack account creates a ticket in a helpdesk project. Their accounts are created using the email address they used to create a ticket using an online form or sending an email message.
Like standard users, reporters are expected to verify the primary email address that is assigned to their user account. This helps to ensure that someone isn't creating an account to impersonate the email account owner.
Standard users are asked to verify their primary email address by responding to a verification email message. This message is generated automatically when their account is first created.
Reporters are considered to have verified their email accounts the first time they reply to the confirmation email for a new ticket.
Unauthenticated Reporters
A special Unauthenticated reporter badge is displayed in tickets where the reporter was not signed in to YouTrack when they submitted a new ticket using an online form. This badge is meant to indicate that the ticket could be from someone who is attempting to impersonate someone else or is posing as a customer to gather sensitive information.
This badge is shown even when the reporter email has been verified. That's because the person using this email address to submit a ticket using an online form could be someone other than the person who verified the email address.
When the reporter replies to an email message that was generated in response to their form submission or a public comment that was posted to the YouTrack ticket, the reporter is considered to have confirmed their identity. The Unauthenticated reporter is removed from the ticket.
Reporter Access
Reporters have a specific, predefined access profiles in YouTrack. Basically, they only have access to view their own tickets and public articles in the knowledge base. They aren't allowed to have access to issues in standard projects and can't be granted additional permissions that would give them broader access. To learn more about the access profile for YouTrack reporters, see Reporters.
It is also possible to configure helpdesk projects so that they're only accessible to a predefined set of authorized reporters. This means that reporters who are allowed to create tickets in public helpdesk projects are unable to create and view tickets in the restricted project. To learn more, see Restricted Helpdesk Projects.
Helpdesk projects are generally designed to meet your customers where they are without forcing them to log into YouTrack. Email channels and online forms are optimized to let helpdesk agents manage incoming requests in YouTrack while the reporter receives updates for and adds comments to their tickets from their email inbox.
As long as your YouTrack installation is available over the internet, reporters can access and view their tickets directly in YouTrack. They can access your site using links to reported tickets in email notifications. These links let reporters log in and review all the tickets they have submitted in the helpdesk projects hosted on your YouTrack site. For more information about logging in and reviewing tickets as a reporter, see Logging in to YouTrack and Reviewing Your Tickets.