This announcement is a follow-up to the recent announcements about views, sorting, and pagination changes. In order to help you better understand what is happening and what to expect, we’ve put together a list of frequently asked questions.
Here are links to the original announcements, in case you need or want to review them:
- Announcing changes to views pagination and sorting user profile pages
- Announcing changes to views sorting and ordering
This FAQ includes these sections:
- What sorting changes are happening on view pages?
- What sorting changes are happening on user profile pages?
- Will I be able to know what page I’m on when using the new pagination?
- Will I be able to know the total number of pages when using the new pagination?
- Will I be able to click to the last page when using the new pagination?
- How do I find duplicates if I can’t sort on “Subject” and skip pages?
- How can I skip to a collection of tickets based on "Subject" lines that are prepended with specific text?
- What is the new filtering capability that was mentioned?
What sorting changes are happening on view pages?
On view pages, you will no longer see the ability to sort on Subject and Submitter. You will also no longer see those options in the Order by option on the Views management page when creating or editing views.
This change has already taken place.
For more information, see Changes to the sorting behavior in views and Changes to the ordering behavior in views.
What sorting changes are happening on user profile pages?
The sorting changes on user profiles pages are separate from the sorting changes on view pages. Sorting will be removed on the Subject, Requester, and Group columns that are on user profile pages. This means you will no longer see the capability to sort tickets using those columns when you are on a user’s profile page.
We’ll start rolling out this change to accounts on Jul 28, 2022 and it will reach all accounts by Aug 22, 2022.
For more information, see Changes to sorting user profile pages.
Will I be able to know what page I’m on when using the new pagination?
Yes, you will be able to see the page number you are currently on out of the total number of pages there are. For more information, see Cursor-based pagination for views.
Will I be able to know the total number of pages when using the new pagination?
Yes, you will be able to see the page number you are currently on out of the total number of pages there are. For more information, see Cursor-based pagination for views.
Will I be able to click to the last page when using the new pagination?
Yes, there will be a button called Last that will allow you to go straight to the last page without clicking through. For more information, see Cursor-based pagination for views.
How do I find duplicates if I can’t sort on “Subject” and skip pages?
We recommend using apps in order to find duplicate tickets more efficiently. For example:
- You can use the Show Related Tickets app to find similar tickets that you are on and find duplicates.
- You can also use one of the many third-party merge apps to help take care of duplicate tickets.
You can also use the customer context to see duplicate activity and mark or delete duplicate tickets.
How can I skip to a collection of tickets based on "Subject" lines that are prepended with specific text?
Some Zendesk customers prepend the subject of a ticket with a certain phrase so that, later, they can skip pages and find a collection of tickets that start with that phrase. For example, let’s say you prepend the subject of certain tickets as [VIP Customer]. You have a ticket with a subject that looks like this:
[VIP Customer] Having trouble making changes to my order
If you are using this method to find a collection of tickets, we recommend that you stop. We recommend using tags to find certain tickets instead. For example, you can use triggers and automations to add tags to tickets. Then, you can create views based on tags, so that you can more easily find tickets with those tags.
What is the new filtering capability that was mentioned?
You may have seen comments from other customers on this announcement about how we are working some new filtering capabilities in views.
The new filtering capability will allow you to filter a view without having to create a new view. This will only be available on view pages and not user profile pages. This will make it so you no longer have to sort on a specific attribute and skip pages, and can instead filter on that attribute and get there more efficiently. See images below for a rough idea of what the filtering capability will look like.
We haven’t officially announced this yet. More details will come in an official announcement at a later time.
21 Comments
Is this announcement confirmation that ZenDesk will ignore feedback from their customers and are still enacting these crippling changes?
Why were only these few FAQs addressed? eg. You did not address if the API is changing.
I think it would be a logical assumption that if things are changing in the physical UI and functions are being removed, then they will also be removed from the API. There's no point in them being in the API if they are not able to display anything on the agent side.
Will we be able to turn off the filtering option from being available to agents? I would want supervisors to have this, but it would be the opposite of helpful and seems like it would encourage cherry picking from an agent perspective, as this allows them to filter a view and only take tickets with specific fields.
Thank you for continuing the conversation here.
Bob, API changes are also going along with the UI changes.
CJ, The first phase of the filtering will be to all in an account or none in the account. As to the cherry picking, This is filtering within the tickets in the View the agents already have access to, but yes it could be leveraged to filter it down to groups to close many at once. We will continue to improve the filtering capabilities and permissions is definitely up there on next improvements.
Hi there
Will there still be a way for me to easily sort by subject?
My team for the purpose of training sort by subject, as our app sends tickets with preset subject lines, this change has made that needlessly difficult to pull together.
From what I can tell, this change could've been made alongside the old system, without causing needless disruptions.
And now:
WHY?
You could prevent the set-up of views as a whole and also eliminate those annoying "tickets". Life in Zendesk Support would become much easier.
I think you forgot the purpose of the tool here.
Sad!
Oliver
Really disappointed with this change. Whether it's believed to be the correct way to use the system or not, myself and my team regularly use the 'subject' to filter tickets of the same subject to efficiently work through them. Using any of your suggested workarounds is far more time-consuming and inconvenient. Please review changing this back!
Please reconsider this change. Sorting by subject is a basic function that everyone should have access to.
I am sorry..reading the work around is confusing and frustrating to no end! Just change it back. Why are changes made with out user feedback?
Just let me sort by subject. It's very easy since tickets I get have dates listed and need to be sorted in that matter.
Now I will have to setup some kind of new field and fill that out for every ticket and then sort by that. So much more work.
Please undo and revert this. BOOOO!
Why remove sorting by subject? As mentioned several times in this thread it's a very common feature to have which now means more configuration work to add additional views to further separate work, yet we're still limited to Top 12 global views.
Why remove an essential feature if you have not even added the new replacement feature yet? Even with the new features mentioned in the post sorting by subject is still essential.
Please reconsider and revert this.
I mentioned this in person to the ZD team when we chatted about these changes a couple weeks back, but I'll add it here for the record too...
The view filtering tool will be ok, but unless I can filter on the subject line and search by keyword, and return similar results, it's not really going to replace the need to sort by subject. But truthfully I don't need to filter my views, I just need to sort them.
Please reconsider this change. Sorting by subject is a basic function that everyone should have access to.
Please revert to being able to sort by subject. We use this function as a core way of working so to remove it is very disruptive.
Why even remove it? With future changes like this, why not audit the users and ask why we work like this. Such an arrogant thing to just remove it and wait for complaints to roll in.
Can this update be reverted back ASAP?
You have had negative feedback on the announcement article and you still went ahead with this update, knowing it would negatively impact your customers.
Like others have stated, please consider reverting back to being able to sort by subject. This is an essential part of my workflow as I manage 100+ tickets that are listed by client's name in the subject. Sorting by subject allowed me to get to their ticket very quickly from my view. Now, it takes me three to four clicks to get there by searching for their organization. It's really slowing my work down!
Please stop making unnecessary changes. It was my my idea to bring Zendesk to our organization for Support. However the constant changes need to stop. Please take into account the training and communication time changes can take up - there is no need to make what you feel are small silly changes when they an interrupt work flows and slow down your end users! You say create triggers instead of using subject lines to filter - that does not work for all scenarios. Triggers are great and I use many of them for our different views, but like I said in some scenarios a simple filter of the subject line will work vs a trigger. You left every other filter (like ticket ID), but removed the ability to filter by subject. NONSENSE.
This change has messed up our daily routines. What was easily done by sorting by the subject, now takes extra time. Please bring back the sorting by subject asap!
Can we (Your paying customers) have an official update on this, Salvador Vazquez
This is clearly a major incident.
Hi everyone, please see my comment in the original announcement article here.
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