Adding comments to tickets

Available on all Suite plans Available on all Support plans

Once a ticket has been created and is assigned to an agent, it's the agent's job to resolve the support request. To do that, you may need to gather more information from the requester. To communicate with the requester, you add public comments to the ticket. Public comments can be read by anyone who has access to the ticket.

This article includes the following sections:

Commenting basics
Adding a public or private comment to a ticket
Adding formatting and inline images to comments

Commenting basics

There are two types of comment:

Public comments can be read by anyone who has access to the ticket, including anyone copied on the ticket. When you add a public comment, the requester is notified via an email message (unless the notification trigger is disabled). If the requester responds back to the email notification or comments in the ticket, their response is added as a public comment to the ticket. All of your communication is captured in the ticket.
Private comments, also known as internal notes, are only visible to agents, not to the ticket requester or any other end-users who might be copied on the ticket. A ticket with only private comments is considered a private ticket. Public comments can be made internal-only, if needed (see Changing a ticket comment from public to private). Private comments have a yellow background.

You cannot remove a comment from a ticket.

Note: If you need to permanently remove sensitive data from tickets, including text in comments or ticket attachments, ask your administrator to use the Redaction API (see Redacting a comment and Redacting attachments) or the Redaction app on Zendesk Labs.

If a comment is added to a ticket while you are viewing it, the comment is temporarily given a blue background to help you notice it. Other ticket updates, such as changes to Followers, are also shown temporarily in blue. The exception is the Zendesk Agent Workspace which doesn't support blue (temporary) colors for comments.

Ticket comment limits

Ticket comments have the following limits:

Each ticket has a maximum limit of 5,000 comments. When this limit is reached, you'll get an error if you try to add any more comments. The ticket can still be updated in other ways, as long as the updates don't include additional comments.
Each individual ticket comment has a maximum limit of 65,535 characters. This character limit includes all HTML tags and characters.

Adding a public or private comment to a ticket

You can add public or private (internal) comment to a ticket.

To add a comment to a ticket

Select a ticket.
To enter a public comment, select Public reply, or to enter a private comment, select Internal note.

If you choose Internal note, see About adding attachments to private comments for information about how the attachment will be handled in the subsequent email notification.
Enter your comment.
Click Submit to update the ticket.
You cannot delete a comment after it is added to the ticket.

It's also possible to add a note to more than one ticket at a time by bulk updating tickets. See Managing tickets in bulk.

An additional way to manage ticket responses is through the use of macros. With macros, you can streamline your workflow by applying simple, standard responses to requests. Macros can be created from scratch, or they can be based on existing ticket properties. See Using macros to update tickets for more information.

Adding formatting and images to comments

You can add links, inline images, and formatting such as italics, bolding, or bulleted lists to your ticket comments.

Rich text formatting options are available at the bottom of the comment field.

This section includes these topics:

Adding formatting and images to comments
Adding inline images to a ticket comments
Adding tables to ticket comments

Adding formatting to ticket comments

You can use the rich text formatting toolbar to apply standard formatting to a ticket comment.

To add formatting to your comment

Click the T at the bottom of the comment field to open the formatting toolbar.

Select the formatting you want to apply to the text.

Toolbar button	Formatting	Keyboard shortcuts
	Increase/decrease heading style	Increase: Ctrl + + ⌘ + + (Mac) Decrease: Ctrl + - ⌘ + - (Mac)
	Bold	Ctrl + B ⌘ + B (Mac)
	Italicize	Ctrl + I ⌘ + I (Mac)
	Change the text color.	Agent Workspace only.
	Bulleted list	Ctrl Shift + 8 ⌘ + Shift + 8(Mac)
	Numbered list	Ctrl + Shift + 7 ⌘ + Shift + 7 (Mac)
	Decrease paragraph indentation	Ctrl + [ ⌘ + [ (Mac)
	Increase paragraph indentation	Ctrl + ] ⌘ + ] (Mac)
	Block quote	Ctrl + Shift + 9 ⌘ + Shift + 9 (Mac)
	Code block	Ctrl + Shift + 6 ⌘ + Shift + 6 (Mac)
	Code span	Ctrl + Shift + 5 ⌘ + Shift + 5 (Mac)
	Hyperlink	Ctrl + K ⌘ + K (Mac)
	Horizontal line	Ctrl + Shift + L ⌘ + Shift + L (Mac)

Note: In addition to rich text formatting, you can also use markdown commands to format your comments. See Formatting text with Markdown.

Adding inline images to a ticket comments

You can add inline images to a ticket comment.

To add inline images

Drag and drop an image from your computer into the comment window, or paste a copied image into the window by right-clicking and selecting Paste or by pressing Ctrl or ⌘ + V.

Note: This option does not work if you have private attachments enabled (See Enabling attachments in tickets). Instead, you need to add images to tickets as attachments (see Adding attachments to ticket comments).

Adding tables to ticket comments

Although you cannot add tables to your comments using the rich text editor options, you can incorporate tables in two ways:

Installing and using the Tables app.
Copying and pasting a table from another editor, such as Excel or Google Sheets.
Note: Pasting tables offers limited functionality. Agents cannot add more columns or rows and they cannot start a table from scratch. These features may be considered for the future.