Hi team!
I'm trying to understand how a customer ticket that was closed 3 months ago got reopened, despite our settings that should prevent it. I'd appreciate help understanding the mechanism.
Setup:
- Tickets Portal is enabled for our customers
- Under Settings > Channels > Messenger > Control inbound volume, "Prevent users replying to closed tickets" is ON, set to 30 days (same for visitors and closed conversations)
- We have a workflow with the trigger "When a ticket is created" (Customer tickets, Web, Users) that applies an SLA and assigns tickets to our support team
What happened (from the ticket activity log):
- 3 months ago: customer submitted a ticket via a Messenger ticket form, it was handled and manually closed by a teammate
- 4 days ago, on the same ticket ID, this sequence appears in the activity log:
- Company attribute set (by AI/automated attribution)
- Moved to "Submitted" and shared
- SLA applied by our "when a ticket is created" workflow
- Assigned by that same workflow
- Importantly: there is no new customer message in the conversation thread at that time — no reply, no email, nothing. The closed conversation has no input field, so the customer couldn't have typed anything anyway
- The reopen sequence looks identical to the original submission pipeline from 3 months ago (attribution → Submitted → workflow), as if a ticket submission was processed again on the existing ticket
My questions:
- Can a Tickets Portal submission be matched/applied to an existing closed ticket instead of creating a new one? Is there any duplicate-matching behavior in the portal? I couldn't find this documented anywhere.
- Why did a workflow with the trigger "When a ticket is created" fire on a ticket that was created 3 months earlier?
- Why didn't the "Prevent users replying to closed tickets after 30 days" setting stop this? Does that setting not apply to portal submissions — only to Messenger replies?
- What's the recommended way to prevent old closed tickets from being reopened with a fresh SLA in this scenario — a state condition in the workflow, a setting, or something else?
