Show HN: Sidequest – A personal ticket system that lives inside Slack | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sidequest – A personal ticket system that lives inside Slack

getsidequest.app

46 pointsSventek13 comments

Sidequest enables you to create task/ticket inboxes right inside Slack – one for each workspace member, and as many channel-based ones as you like. You can CC people, set and track deadlines, chat and share files inside tickets, and receive daily briefings.

Feel free to install Sidequest to your Slack workspace right now, or give it a try in our sandbox workspace first by joining https://join.slack.com/t/sidequestsandbox/shared_invite/zt-f....

Some feedback from my first 5 minutes with it: I invited it to a private channel we have that really only exists for leaving tasks for other people, ran `sidequest create` in that channel, and it created a task entirely unlinked to that channel - ie: the task appears in the @sidequest user, but there's no sign of it in the channel where it was created. This leaves me wondering what the point of inviting the @sidequest user to channels is.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to report your feedback!

The `/sidequest create` is not context-aware right now, it will behave the same way no matter you invoke it (opens the creation modal).

Inviting the @Sidequest user to a channel (public or private) makes this channel visible to the app and allows users to select it as a recipient when creating a quest.

Will invest more time into documentation before final release. :-)

Ahh, I see. Thanks for the clarification. I'll keep up with trialling it and email you if I find anything. Good luck.

Awesome, looking forward to hearing from you.

How do you feel about active office workspaces using the product? I'd be open to pitching it to my team, seems like the exact kind of thing I've been looking for, but just wanted to make sure you were ready for more than individual beta testers.

Sounds awesome!

We have been using Sidequest in our own team with 60+ people and multiple subsidiaries of ours for more than a month now, creating and completing more than 200 quests without significant issues. We have also been working on enterprise tools for a while now (you may want to check out https://mantro.net, that's us), so overall, we're quite confident in the product.

Over the last 24hrs, we have seen quite a number of beta installations and we are working through all logs and feedback to solve smaller issues and implement enhancements. That was our main intention for the public beta, so nothing to worry about. However, it's still a beta, so usage is at your own risk per definition. :-)

If you want to be extra safe, you may want to wait until our app is officially approved by Slack. Review is in progress and we hope this to be done within the next few days. Feel free to drop me a mail at hello@getsidequest.app and I'll make sure to let you know once there are news. Feel free to join our sandbox workspace (see my other comment) in the meantime.

Just to provide an update: Sidequest has been reviewed and approved by Slack in the meantime!

https://slack.com/apps/A011B3BC8MV-sidequest

It's interesting how similar ideas come about. At an old job I worked at, we had an internal tool also named Sidequest where you could write tickets for small tasks you needed help with. That way people who had down time and wanted to crosstrain could easily find people who had tasks they needed help with.

That's actually a great idea! To realize this with (our) Sidequest, you'd simply create a public Slack channel (e.g. #needhelp) where people can post their requests using the @Sidequest app.

The app will then take care of assignments, status tracking, communications, etc.

Nice touch that you came across the same name... it took us a while!

Feedback: the screen shots showing how it works advance much too quickly. It's impossible to spot the helper text, look at the screen, and get any context before it flips. Image carrousels with important information are a poor UX.

The animation seems to pause when you click one of the slides but I couldn't find a way to resume it. I fully agree with you though.

Good point, thank you! I have disabled the automatic scrolling and added buttons instead. Swiping should work as well on mobile.

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