| Suite | Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus |
| Support | Team, Professional, or Enterprise |
You can configure your Zendesk Support instance to be open, closed, or restricted (see Understanding options for end-user access and sign-in). This article describes how to set up an open Zendesk Support instance, so that any user can see your help center and submit support requests.
This article contains the following sections:
Understanding what an open Zendesk Support instance means
Not requiring registration means that all of your users are unverified (users are not prompted to verify their email addresses), which is fine if you don't need or want your users to visit and use your help center (for example, see Setting up to provide email-only support). Registered users are verified, meaning that they (or you) have verified their email addresses and user accounts have been created.
Even though you don't require users to register, your users still have the option of registering and creating a login to use your help center, unless you modify your help center to hide the Sign Up and Login pages.
If you would like to provide open support, you have two options: registered or unregistered end-users. You can add users or they can add themselves.
Keep in mind that if your settings allow anyone to submit tickets, any visitor to your site can register while submitting a support request. This means they'll be able to access Help center content restricted to signed-in users. For more information, see Configuring how end-users access and sign in to Zendesk Support.
Anybody can submit tickets, no registration required
You can permit any user to submit a ticket without registering. If you don't require registration, users do not receive the welcome email, which prompts them to verify their email address and create a password so that they can sign in to your help center. Instead, they get an email notification that their request has been received:
If you don't want your users to visit your help center, because you provide support via email only for example, you can remove the link to the ticket that is contained in the triggers that are used to send email notifications when tickets are received and updated (see Removing ticket links from your notifications).
If you leave the ticket link in the email notifications, the user has the option of clicking the link to register and create a password so that they can sign in and use your help center and track their existing tickets, submit new support requests, and so on. If a registered end-user submits a ticket without signing in, it will be flagged (see About flagged tickets from registered users who are not signed-in).
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Configuration > End users. - In the Anybody can submit tickets section, select Enabled.
- If you use the Zendesk API to let users submit tickets, make sure Require
authentication for request and uploads APIs is not selected.
See Creating anonymous requests in the developer docs.
- Make sure Ask users to register is not selected.
This option is not visible if you haven't activated your help center yet.
- Click Save tab.
If you want to allow end-users to add attachments to their requests, see Enabling attachments in tickets.
Anybody can submit tickets, registration required
When you require your users to register, the support request workflow changes. Rather than the user's support request immediately becoming a ticket, it is held in limbo until the users (or you) have verified their email address. After verification, the ticket is added to your Zendesk.
The registration workflow is described in Options for end-user registration.
To allow anybody to submit tickets and require registration
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Configuration > End users.
- Select Anybody can submit tickets
- Select Ask users to register.Note: If you started using Zendesk after August 20, 2013, this option is not available until you activate your help center. See Getting started with the help center.
- Click Save Tab.
If you want to allow end-users to add attachments to their requests, see Enabling attachments in tickets.
43 comments
Jeff Hubbard
I have what seems to be a really simple use case and I cannot get this to work. Our very small support group has no need for a help center, only the ability for customers to either send an email directly to our support team - for this I set up forwarding and it works fine. Send an email, it opens a ticket. The second is to have a help link on our website, which would link directly to a form which the customer fills out, and a ticket is created. I made the form, even set up conditions, but after following directions for the URL to the form, and using an incognito window, it still takes me to a screen requiring customer login. I have enabled the “Anybody can submit tickets” option and I have yet to be able to get to the form. Any help?
0
Joselo Torres Landa
I'm setting up my Zendesk instance. I signed up for the free trial to start setting everything up. I want any person to be able to submit a support request without having to register.
The options described in this article under “ Anybody can submit tickets, no registration required” seemed to be outdated as they are not as the article mentions.
When disabling the checkbox named “Zendesk authentication” I get a popup error message stating that :
"Nothing Selected
Select an authentication method"
I do NOT want an authentication method.
Please help.
0
Fritz Leon
1263082253089 Is what 1266531072970 wanted to accomplish still not doable? (some forms open to the public and some forms requiring auth sign-in)
0
Kirsten Wilson
Hi Mandy,
Sorry this is happening, since I am not able to see the specific details of your account I'll provide some potential solutions.
You most likely have some placeholders that act as an “open mail relay” meaning any text the spammer includes in the requester name or subject fields will be included unaltered in the email notification the trigger automatically sends out to the email address listed as the requester.
To completely block the spam messages from being created you can enable the “anybody can submit tickets” setting or you can check the spam tickets to see which trigger is being used and remove or replace it with something more generic.
Hopefully this helps, please submit a ticket if you need more help!
0
Gabriel Manlapig
Hi Mandy,
Could you please confirm if these emails are originating from a specific email domain or if they are randomly generated? If you're receiving it from a specific email domain, you can prevent that domain from creating tickets. Use the blocklist from the Admin Center > People > End users.
Add the following entry to your blocklist:
reject:qq.comand save the page.Upon checking, these spam attack tickets are coming via the "Web Widget" channel, It appears that the requester (spammer) might have utilized the Requests API to generate the tickets. This is possible because anonymous users have access to the Requests endpoint by default. Additionally, they set the via attribute to the widget, which gave the impression that it was a web widget ticket.
I hope that helps. Thank you!
0
Mandy Saies
Hi, we've recently started receive spam emails which states via web widget. Is there a way we can block these as we're marking these tickets as spams daily?
0
Gabriel Manlapig
This is actually an expected behaviour. The use of CAPTCHA, which is automatically enabled when you allow "anyone / anybody to submit tickets", but it is mainly designed to deter bots.
Zendesk uses Cloudflare's bot detection and management software, so when the algorithm in place does not find the user a bad bot, even if they are not signed-in they may still be able to submit a ticket without being prompted the CAPTCHA.
This is further explained here - CAPTCHA FAQs
I hope that helps. Thank you!
0
Billie Miller
Hello,
I have a question. By enabling "anybody can submit tickets" I though that CAPTCHA should show up on our Zendesk submission page, but that's not happening. Any ideas?
Thanks!
1
Dane
It can be due to your triggers. The best option is for you to submit a ticket so that we can help you with it.
0
Michael R.
Hi Dane,
This is the native contact form from ZD. We do have the help center enabled as well, and the Enable anyone to send tickets is checked. For some reason, if someone submits a ticket with the form, we get the ticket, but the end user does not get the replies
0
Sign in to leave a comment.