Attachments in Community

Not planned

59 Comments

  • Official comment
    Kasper Sørensen
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Hi everyone,

    We’ve been evaluating this request for some time now and I want to give you an update. Overall we have found that adding attachments to community content gives rise to a lot of concerns. There’s a big risk of abuse when it comes to attaching any kind of file and publishing it online. These risks apply both to Zendesk and to our customers and their users. We evaluate that the use-cases do not warrant the amount of effort needed to prevent abuse. However, we do want to make improvements to community content to alleviate the need for attachments.

    I see quite a few requests in this thread for attaching videos, and yes this is a specific type of content addition that we want to work on - We will soon be working on adding video embedding to community content. The actual videos will be hosted on services like Youtube, Wistia or Vimeo, companies that are excellent at moderating and securing such content. We will also have to bolster our moderation pipeline to let customers control what video content to allow.

    For other types of attachments, we generally see a tendency to use hyperlinks rather than sharing large files directly on websites. For example, for sharing code that doesn’t fit into a simple snippet, we think GitHub and similar services work a lot better. Or if you want to share a document, a presentation or a spreadsheet the various online office suites all have sharing-by-linking support. Finally, services like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, WeTransfer make simple sharing of files easy, and can be linked to as well.

    With all this in mind, I am marking this request as “Not planned”. I thank you all for all the great feedback and hope to excite you all with all the great community functionality that we will be working on instead!

  • Christian Colding

    Hi Jeanette,

    Our research found that very few non-image attachments were used in our old product. Adding other types of attachments have some security implications, so we would have to assess those before we could implement it.

    Thank you again for all your great feedback!

    -10
  • Donald Fontanilla

    Hi,

    I'd like to recommend if we can have attachments that customer can directly access the attachment without having to log into Zendesk. For example, when they receive outlook notification in regards to comments with attachments is it possible for them to download the attachment directly as a file and not to have to click on the link to the attachment.

    Thanks,
    Donald Fontanilla

    0
  • Christian Colding

    Hi Donald,

    I am not entirely sure I understand. You can't attach files in comments for Help Center. Are you perhaps referring to attached files in tickets?

    0
  • Donald Fontanilla

    Hi Christian,

    Sorry might have posted under the wrong category. Yes it is for Zendesk ticket attachments.

    This is my first time in posting a comment as I did not have access to do so before. I've received feedback from Zendesk support that I could send this an improvement feature  for future Zendesk updates / versions.

    Thanks.

    0
  • Christian Colding

    Hi Donald,

    That is quite alright. Glad to have you participating! When it comes to your request I have found this discussion which seems to be related:

    https://support.zendesk.com/hc/communities/public/posts/203424756-Send-attachments-as-attachments-not-links?locale=en-us

    You are very welcome to go there and participate.

     

    0
  • JetBrains

    Hi,

    I'd like to second this request regarding attachments in the community. That'd solve a lot of difficulties with attachments for many of our users. Please consider adding it (optional setting with customisable extensions would work as well).

    Thank you!

    9
  • Trina Chiasson

    Yeah, this is critical for us. We're considering ZenDesk as a support system + user community for a data analysis app, so our users will need to attach .csv and .xls files. 

    I can understand why non-image attachments are rare in other support communities. Our users have specific needs for spreadsheets, so this feature would be much appreciated :)

    10
  • Maggie Ungerboeck

    This is also critical for us.  One of the key features we are missing for our user community is that ability to share files with one another (crystal reports files, csv files, doc files, xls files for example). 

    It's one of the biggest reasons we aren't getting near the activity in our forums as we'd like because our users can't share this information with each other.  Our current proposed work around is to create a new category with sections and allowing our users to create articles in those sections....but that's less than ideal since it then appears as part of our standard help center but in reality, isn't really part of it since it's user driven....

    7
  • OT

    I've just been asked by our Customer Success team about attaching files to Community.  We want users to be able to share their guides to our software with each other.  These guides are all in Word and PDF format.  Most of our users don't have access to somewhere they can upload files to for linking purposes, so they'd need to attach directly.

    We've been trying to get users engaged in our Community, and now they want to but we can't offer the functionality!

    7
  • Aden Maine

    This is also critical for us too.

    We have a Business intelligence dashboard that users can save and share, this kind of file needs to be uploadable.

    Thanks!

    7
  • Remco de Waard

    We could use this feature also. We just started with a community for a group of loyal customers. I would like to attach (for instance) Powerpoint and Word documents (meeting minutes) to a post. Now I think about working around this by making a specific page in the Knowledge base that will host the file.. 

    Ideally I would like be -as an admin- able to select the kind of files that I allow end-users to upload in a post. 

    6
  • Maggie St.Clair

    I believe that attachments were able to be added to comments in the old Knowledge Base. We moved to the new Help Center last week and I am trying to add an attachment that a customer added right before we flipped the switch and I can not do it. Would be great to have this ability back!  

    5
  • Adam Wig

    I second this as well. If the ZenDesk communities have any chance of replacing classic forums, customers need the ability to attach files via a community post. 

    6
  • Nia

    We would love this,  and echo the problems mentioned above, we're trying to encourage clients into our forum / help centre,  only to be hit with this restriction ...  is anyone from Zendesk going to get back to us?  I noticed another post on similar lines dating back to 2011 .. five years later and still no progress?

     

     

    6
  • Belinda Orme

    We are launching a new Community/Forums site (as part of moving the web portal to the help centre) and would love to use the existing Zendesk platform for the Forums. Our users will need to share files to make this successful, and so this feature is important to us. Please consider how we can attach files other than images.

    6
  • Kai Kohler

    We also could use this feature.  

    Our old forum posts had attachments, and we just moved ours to the Zendesk Community.  Now lots of posts refer to attachments that aren't there because Zendesk Community doesn't support it.

    Our users also share guides on using our software, and examples of advanced designs, as well as relevant associated files, like database files (.csv, .xls, etc).

    7
  • Jennifer Woodson

    We would like this feature. We like to use the community forum for beta testing feedback, and it would be beneficial for the testers to be able to attach their project files.

     

    4
  • Catharine Coleman

    We need our customer to be able to add attachments to a Community Post.   Can you let me know if this is in the road map or not?  The decision to move forward with Zendesk relies on this functionality.

     

    Thank you!

    4
  • Rocco Pigneri

    We have already had customers ask how to attach our product's files to forum posts.  In our previous forum, we were able to use this feature to help clients share work with each other and also to promulgate official responses--including examples--to customer questions.  Is this item on the roadmap yet? If it is, when will it be delivered?

     

    Thank you!

    3
  • Dave Tuddenham

    Enabling users to add attachments in the community is critical for us. I can't believe you have a viable product without this, when you compare Zendesk community to other forum like offerings out there.

     


    Regards,
    Dave

    3
  • RS Components Ltd

    Please provide this functionality, I think that the forums are the weakest part of the ZenDesk functions and this is an absolute must.

    2
  • Andy Kelly

    @zendesk - any comment about this? Is it on your radar? Are you looking into it? It's clearly an issue for people and some feedback one way or another would be appreciated.

    2
  • Gerry Mullin

    Definitely need to be able to attach documents other than images!

     

    2
  • James Pitcher

    Can we have an update on this?  I'm looking at enabling our community and a big sticking point is not being able to upload file types other than images.  Our customers would like to share product related files, .log files etc.

    1
  • Oxana Noa Umansky

    +1

    Our customers also need the upload functionality + rich editor in the community. Why was it removed in the first place?!

    1
  • Remco de Waard

    Well Oxana, you can read the answer to your question in Christian Colding his first reply in this post

    Then again, we also need this functionality. We would like our customers to share meeting minutes and powerpoints. Because this is not possible at the moment, I see them posting screenshots of their powerpoints. Meeting minutes and PDF files are shared by a Google Drive link. That is not what we want; we would like to have it all in one place.

    2
  • Rocco Pigneri

    As posted here (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203444126/comments/115000468407), it is taking longer for us to respond to our customers because they cannot attach documents that are giving them trouble.  When might this solution be implemented?

    1
  • Patricia Bracke

    Hi

    we use the Community to share best practices for usage of API with our implementation partners.We expect to be able to do such via attachments.

    Today only options we have are:

    1. Move it to Articles, but we do not want that, we want to share this in the Community

    2. Add the code inline - in case of big examples, this is no option

    3. Add it as a url and store it on our website: this is an additional step for us and we believe not the nicest way to share code in a post

    Please make the feature available again.

    Thanks in advance,

    Patricia

    1
  • Rholleran

    Hello - I'd like to also suggest that Zendesk bring back the functionality to attach documents into the communities. Our users like to share documents and the most recent legislation with one another. Further, our team has a big need to share product guidance documentation with our users within the community. We have others teams that would like to use also use zendesk communities for their users but are hesitating to because of this gap in functionality. 

     

    Thanks for your consideration!

    Ryan 

    3

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