codidact
Make "contact us" more robust, collecting info about current user and page
For some support issues it makes sense for people to post to meta -- "how do I do X?" questions in particular, where other community members can help. Other times, it's a one-off issue or shouldn't be public. We now have a ticketing system for community support, so let's add a "contact us" link.
If you are logged out, clicking the link should suggest you log in if you have an account, but offer an email address as a fallback. Page should encourage people to include the profile link if it's about a user issue so we know who we're talking with. (One use case for "has account but using this page" is login problems.)
If you are logged in, clicking the link should give you a form. For now, let's prompt for a summary (one line) and a description of the problem (regular textbox). Maybe later we'll have categories of support requests (choose a type from a menu), but let's see what emerges. Form submission should create a ticket in our ticketing system and automatically capture and include: user profile link, page the person was on when clicking "contact us" (form referrer), any special user status (moderator, admin, currently suspended...), and whatever else seems useful. Do not capture IP address or any other PII; if we should need that then a dev can dig it out of the logs, but we want to minimize default access to PII.
(My main intent with the "special status" is that if the contact is coming from a community moderator, it helps to know that rather than having to go look or remember. Once I was doing that, I figured there might be other statuses that could be useful. Do others only if easy.)
Also, we should provide the user with access to the form content, either a link or an emailed copy. People should be able to look up what they sent and when.
Related: request for a "contact us" link: https://meta.codidact.com/posts/281881 (which could be the support email address for now and this later).
One hitch with our current setup: you have to create an account on the support portal in order to submit a ticket. That's not ideal, and I'll file an internal ticket about that. This does also make me realize that we shouldn't baking our support portal into the OS software on GitHub; we probably need a global configuration setting for "where to send support stuff".