The Ticket Redaction app enables you to redact information or attachments from tickets. This is especially useful for removing personal information or sensitive account data from ticket comments. The Ticket Redaction app works on any tickets, except for tickets with a Closed status.
This article will cover the following topics:
- Installing the Ticket Redaction app
- Redact text from a ticket
- Redact attachments from a ticket
- Errors and troubleshooting
Installing the Ticket Redaction app
To install the Ticket Redaction app
-
In Admin Center, click the Apps and integrations icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Apps > Zendesk Support Apps.
- Search for Ticket Redaction and select the app from the results list
- Click Install in the upper-right corner
- Click Install to complete the setup
Redact text from a ticket
To redact text from a ticket, simply copy paste it into the app and click "Redact". A modal will appear that shows how many comments in the ticket this text appears in:
If it all looks good, hit the "Redact" button to confirm.
You'll see a success message in the top right to let you know that the redactions were successful in the ticket:
As in the message, you will need to refresh the ticket page in order to see the redacted text. The text you redacted will be now shown as ▇▇▇▇ characters.
Redact attachments from a ticket
To redact both in-line and normal attachments from tickets, click "Redact attachments" from the app.
A modal will open displaying the list of attachments on the ticket. Select which attachment you wish to redact and click "Redact".
Redacted attachments are replaced with a blank text file called redacted.txt:
Errors and troubleshooting
This section includes some troubleshooting tips and common error messages for the Ticket Redaction app.
Restricted access
If you choose to restrict access to the Redaction app using both the Group and the Role definitions you will only allow users that meet both criteria access to Redaction App functions. If a user meets only one of the criteria but not both they will not be able to use the Redaction App
You do not have permission to perform redaction on this ticket
This error is shown to agents that are in a group that does not have ticket deletion permissions. This permission is required because the agent will be deleting data from Zendesk tickets and this data is not recoverable. Agents that need to perform redaction should have this permission.
You see an error when attempting to redact a URL or text with other special characters
If you choose to redact a URL or text with other special characters, and are experiencing an error, try breaking up the URL into smaller words or components by redacting it in parts around the special character. Alternatively, try switching to Agent Workspace, which has an improved, native ticket redaction feature.
25 Comments
Im getting an "Error 400" when trying to redact som text from a ticket? Any idea what that means?
May it be that you try to edit a closed ticket? It's not possible anymore to edit closed tickets. Maximum is solved tickets.
I think there was a way directly with the API but I'm not sure if I remember wrongly here.
We utilize this app for ticket replies. Is there any plan to extend this functionality to redacting messages in a Side Conversation?
Since we cannot delete a Side Conversation reply, presently, we are having to delete the ticket altogether, which unfortunately has negative ripple effects - if people on the deleted ticket's Side Conv reply, then we essentially lose sight of this reply. In my testing, it appears that if we restore the ticket, the Side Conv reply is visible on the ticket. Has anyone figured out a workaround?
Is that possible to use the ticket redaction feature automatically through a trigger, for example?
I'd like to redact automatically some attachments, and not depending on manual intervention. Should this be done??
Hey Rafael,
I'm afraid at this time the Ticket Redaction app will only work through manual intervention. There's no way to have the Support triggers interact with the app to automatically remove attachments.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
The app settings have checkboxes for permission by role and permission by group. Are these inclusive or exclusive? For instance, if I grant permission for role SpecialAgent and group X, who can use the app 1) People who have role SpecialAgent AND belong to group X, or 2) people who have role SpecialAgent OR belong to group X?
Hi Virginia,
Thanks for reaching out! In the scenario you laid out it would be option 1. They would need to be part of that group and have that role in order to access the app. Also keep in mind this is not superseded by Admin or Owner privileges in support so if you setup permissions within the app they will be absolute.
Thanks!
Jason Schaeffer | Customer Advocate |
In lots of cases, the app says "Text does not occur in ticket" even when the text is right there. We've tried it on lots of different tickets and texts. Can this be fixed, please? Thanks
Hi Kostas,
My name is Michael with Zendesk support.
It appears that you already have a support ticket with us, where we'll communicate with you to troubleshoot this issue you're experiencing with the app.
Michael Froeming | Senior Customer Advocacy Specialist
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Is there a way to use the ticket redaction tool with a Macro? example: have a Macro set up change contact reason, product used, and redact ALL attachments (regardless of name/file type, etc)?
Hi Bryce, unfortunately I don't see a way to do that. If "contact reason" and "product used" are dropdown fields, you could use a macro to set those and then perhaps add an internal note to the ticket to remind agents to use the redaction app to redact all attachments?
Hey Bryce,
Disclaimer: this is not pretty, or supported by Zendesk.
You may be able to achieve this by having a macro add a tag or other use change the ticket to a state that means you want to redact all macros. Let's say you add a tag 'redact'
Have a trigger watch for a ticket updated and contains redact tag, the send a notify target to a zapier webhookwith the ticket id or similar platform. From there, you might be able to identify attachments and then get the filename and make a call out to the api endpoint for redactions.
Some code might be required and you'd probably want to do a lot of testing but I think it could work in theory.
@... appreciate the insight, however it's not a "reminder to redact" type situation, but rather the sheer volume of some of the stuff we get sent to us that needs redacting... Even still, the attachment redaction is only half of it, there is still data in the ticket itself that needs to be redacted manually, I was just trying to figure out a way to minimize what portion of the redaction would need to be done manually. Appreciate it though
@... Not gonna lie, you lost me at "flux capacitor" lol... I have 0 coding/programming experience, and on top of that, in my current role, I'm just an agent in zendesk, not an actual zendesk admin, so even if I was a programmer, I wouldn't have the rights/means to test/manage any of that. I was hoping for a "yeah, just a matter of calling that API via the macro" or something along those lines so I could serve it up on a silver platter to our zendesk administration team. Appreciate all the info though!
Bryce
Hello,
Is there a way to redact attachments of a Zendesk ticket by leveraging liquid scripting in a trigger? We have large number of attachments which should be redacted before the ticket status moves to "Closed" state.
We are aware that manual redaction the content/attachments from tickets is possible using Zendesk redaction app. However, because of the volume of the attachments that are to be redacted, we are looking for an automated redaction process which can be either by using triggers, macros, other scripting techniques. Any information or a direction to solve this issue is much appreciated.
Thanks!
Hi Anil.
There's isn't currently a way to do this – for visibility, I'd recommend creating a post in our Feedback on Support topic, using our template to structure your feedback. That will allow others to upvote and add their own use cases.
Hi, when using the redact app, why are you sometimes presented with Error 400 or text does not occur when it's right in front of you... is it something to do with punctuation being used within the text? Does the application support punctuation?
Thank you, Lisa
Hey Lisa! Punctuation is supported within the app, so I suspect that there is a more nuanced issue with the ticket comment content itself causing this behavior. If you are seeing 400 errors when using the Redact App, we would love to investigate the root cause further! If you run into this with a ticket again, you can open up a ticket with our Support team who can take a closer look 😊
Dan Ross
Can you please let me know if solution you are describing above with Zapier & "redact" tag is still valid /can be used? Can you please share more details on this?
@... Brett Bowser
Are any developments introduced or already live since last year around auto removal of attachments from tickets? GDPR wise this will be extremely useful for Zendesk customers.
Kindly appreciate your time to getting back to me!
Hi Paul,
Yes, you will be using a 3rd party tool like Zapier for example. Based on our understanding of the suggested workflow/theory, you will have a macro to add a tag (redact) to a ticket and once the tag has been added, a trigger will fire to your target containing the details, for example, to zapier and that tool will run an API to delete/redact the attachments.
As we checked, it looks like automatic redaction is still not available but per this community feedback, this is firmly on our radar. Thank you!
Hi Jupete Manitas
Many thanks for getting back to me on this, appreciate!
I've been trying since this morning to envision how to implement your suggestion but I've not got too far...
So, it looks to me that a trigger will have to be built to ping a webbook with this endpoint:
https://{subdomain}.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/{ticket_id}/comments/{comment_id}/attachments/{attachment_id}/redact
Zapier would be interesting to use here in order to add a 24h delay for example before removing the attachment.
However, how is it possible to pass over the attachment id to the API call above?
Thank you in advance!
The attachment ID can be extracted by using List Comments. Passing over the attachment_id directly to the endpoint you have provided is not possible. You'll need to create a custom script that will call the List Comments and extract the attachment_id. This requires proficiency in a scripting language or the usage of a middleware.
There should be no need for a "Redaction app" if agents were permitted to edit or remove comments from tickets. There is no good reason not to have this feature; you can always make it optional for the Admins to have a permanent audit log while the ticket comments are edited.
Can you make it so that the system automatically deletes attachments after 30 days in each ticket?
That isn't something that's currently an option to automatically delete attachments after 30 days. But, it we'd love to hear some more details about the use case and impact that a change like this would make for your team as part of the feature request.
I'd recommend creating a post in our Feedback on Support topic, using our template to structure your feedback. That will allow others to upvote and add their own use cases. Thank you!
Hi SP Bhattacharya,
We, at Strac, have built a Zendesk Redactor solution which will automatically detect and redact messages/attachments after 'x' number of days. You can configure that 'x' or also redact after ticket is solved or resolved.
Please check us out here: https://www.strac.io/integrations/zendesk
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