Show HN: I rolled my own simple support / Helpdesk SaaS aimed at Indie Hackers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I rolled my own simple support / Helpdesk SaaS aimed at Indie Hackers

reallysimplesupport.com

84 pointsgigamick69 comments

I don't know much about Laravel or Symfony, but your error pages show a full stack trace with the source code of the PHP files. Might want to turn that off.

Upping this. If you hit a 404 page it seems a ton of your server side source code is visible.

The code revealed there is basically all open source Laravel framework stuff, but yeah, having APP_DEBUG=true turned on has potential to expose other more meaningful vulnerabilities.

It also offers some performance benefits IIRC

I’m guessing it’s also the cause of the JavaScript using inline source maps, meaning that it’s shipping over 2MB to do⸺ I think it’s currently literally nothing but the click handler to expand the FAQs (which would be better not collapsed in the first place, or failing that, implemented with the <details> element).

No, that's (typically; in the default setup, at the very least; you could manage to make them related but it'd be a bit silly and take specific efforts) independent of APP_DEBUG.

the real danger is that app_debug does less security checks in the middleware layers.

Hey thanks for this. Yeah I'm a bit cowboyish in that regard haha. I'll turnout off when I go to put it out into the world for real.

For now I'm really appreciating the feedback I'm getting (only started working on this 4 nights ago).

I understand the motivation to keep it in debug when you first put it online, but the HN community is rightly quite hawkish on this type of thing, it is a potentially massive security risk.

If your hope is that you could gain some initial customers from here, it will almost certainly put a significant number off of giving it a go. I know you are super early with a MVP but as you are asking people to consider paying you already, I hope you reconsider.

Exactly won't be long before his Stripe environment variables are leaked through the debug error message.

Honestly, not looking for users - I'm looking for feedback, which I'm getting by the bucketload and it is amazing!

Also running on single VM in a GCP zone is a disaster waiting to happen.

Why? I've been running services on single instances for 13 years and it's been ok. Not everything has to be webscale.

It's not about being webscale it's about being professional.

It's not professionalism to increase the cost of your service regardless of your needs. Maybe 99.99% is good enough for the OP's price point, and if I want five nines I'll pay for Zendesk.

In this sort of situation, using multiple servers is likely to reduce reliability. Needless complexity is not a good thing. Making a system distributed has a real cost.

Debug turned off :-)

Started on this 4 nights ago and due to the intentional simplicity of it, I've decided it's good enough to put out there and start getting feedback.

Over the past year or so I've tried basically every support tool for my main business and they are all either comedically expensive or absolutely shit.

This solution I've built is aimed at Indie Hackers, Bootstrappers etc. It does the job. I'm now using it for real as the support tool on my main business.

Looks like the flag at the bottom (is it supposed to be a flag) is not working. The powered by pizza is working though!

yeah its supposed to be a Scottish flag. What are you seeing?

https://imgur.com/a/gUwTB5q

I'll take "Firefox on Linux" for 600, Alex!

I get a Black Flag instead (https://i.imgur.com/j7vYE9M.png on Brave+Firefox/Linux)

If you’re wondering why it would appear so:

Most flags are made of two regional indicator symbols, like this for the United Kingdom which has ISO 3166 code GB:

  U+1F1EC REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER G
  U+1F1E7 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER B

If the font has flags, it should render this as a Union Jack, but if it doesn’t, it should render something along the lines of “GB” (which, frankly, is generally more useful if you try using flags without labels).

But Scotland has the ISO 3166 code GB-SCT, a format the regional indicators weren’t designed to cope with (for better or for worse), so it uses a different encoding technique and is comprised of the following sequence of seven scalar values:

  U+1F3F4 WAVING BLACK FLAG
  U+E0067 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G
  U+E0062 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER B
  U+E0073 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER S
  U+E0063 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER C
  U+E0074 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER T
  U+E007F CANCEL TAG

As you observe, this has a significantly worse fallback behaviour: the tag characters are non-printing, so you get just a black flag.

Windows + Firefox/Chrome and Edge. All have a black flag for me.

So odd that the pizza works and the flag doesn't. Same fontawesome package.

This is not coming from Font Awesome; you’re using regular emoji, and depending on the host being able to render it. U+1F355 SLICE OF PIZZA has been around since 2010, but the Scotland flag sequence is from 2017 and some platforms have been deliberately not including country flags because they are generally not necessary (though the Scottish flag suffers more than most because of its composition, see my other nearby comment) and they are the subject of a few international disputes (e.g. PRC objects to Taiwan’s flag being included) and so it’s easier to just keep out of it all.

haha!

If anything, Firefox on Linux is more likely to get it right, as it will typically be shipped with the font Twemoji Mozilla which includes this flag. I think they don’t ship that font on macOS or Windows, and it sounds like at least the default emoji font stack for Windows doesn’t support this flag.

Odd… I’m seeing it on multiple different connections. And if the pizza’s working there’s no reason the flag shouldn’t be.

Both font awesome fonts

You could have tried FreeScout by any chance?

Freescout is cool but there will be a huge section of folk not wanting the hassle of self hosting.

I don't believe you have added the ability to create tickets via email, that is essential. Consumers hate traditional ticket systems, they want to use email, and to be able to reply to "tickets" via email. HelpScout does this well by making it email first. I strongly suggest for it to be truly "Really Simple" email based ticketing is essential.

Edit:

And a quick FYI, your support link on the bottom of your other site (https://songbox.com, nice domain!) doesn't work, you have missed off the ".com", assume it should be: https://reallysimplesupport.com/songbox

Doh. thank you!

and thank you - that domain cost a fortune!

Some feedback: needs some screenshots. I'm not gonna invest time creating an account to try it out if I can't see in advance what it sort of looks like.

Noted - and on it. Thanks for the input.

Screenshots added :-)

There is an XSS vulnerability at the comments.

Cheers - addressing this today.

I love HN - months of feedback in like 20 mins haha.

Dig the simplicity. I could get into this with some more customization. Also, yeah, your error page is on in production. Also...

>You can’t create a portal session in live mode until you save your customer portal settings in live mode at https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/billing/portal.

Thanks so much. What extra customisation would you like to see?

I’ve added more customisation. Would love your feedback.

Also on product hunt today

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/really-simple-support?comm...

I like the concept. Since users have to register to see the product, I think the landing page needs to be more informative. I was lost at "3. Add the link to your page to your website". Are you saying my app's support page needs to redirect to the link that the platform gave me? I think that should be reworded.

Ok this is amazing feedback. I'll work on this today and maybe even make a dummy dashboard that folk can play with.

Really cool idea. I've been looking for something for this for a previous project, but didn't find anything. I think an important feature to replace Zendesk for many would be an API, so integrating into existing forms and apps is simpler.

Best of luck!

Thanks so much. Adding an API would make sense given this is targeted at makers.

Great feedback.

I’ve made a bunch of changes and put it on product hunt today if you’re interested

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/really-simple-support?comm...

I haven't really looked around in this space but I've used zendesk which 1) sucked, and 2) once you ignore all the useless javascript effects, it didn't really seem to do much. WHCMS is simpler and better but I've only used that from the customer side.

So I'd expect there are a zillion FOSS systems out there that perform this function, and if none are to your liking it's always possible to modify an existing one. Why write from scratch? Am I missing something? This seems like something that would have been done on one of those screen builder apps in the old MS-DOS era.

The drupal repository might be a good place to look for this sort of thing.

I just created a dummy support ticket, but is not visible in dashboard. I refreshed it many times.. after few intervals too..

https://reallysimplesupport.com/dashboard

Core functionality is not working.

Haven't got email notification too.

Interesting. What business name did you create and I'll have a look?

I have had about 500 support tickets this morning, and the emails to go with it haha. All from hacker news and reddit people so it is working fine on this end. I'd like to look into your account to see what the problem is.

Acme Project: test

Kinda unrelated to the product but your landing looks really nice. Is it the default Bootstrap theme or a customized one? I see you use utilities classes like pt-1, pt-2, ... Could you please share a little bit about your styling tech.

Looks like they're using the Tailwind CSS framework.

Actually its just Bootstrap5 :-)

I'm just using bootstrap5 and the design (if you want to call it that lol) is my own.

I don't believe css frameworks should be used for "design" so to speak, as in themes.

I just use the helper classes like padding, margin, flexbox etc

The actual design is just something I came up with.

i actually would love something like this but based on the site i can't tell exactly how it works. Do support tickets get created via a form or by emailing a support mailbox?

I use freshdesk currently for my org and want something better

What do you hate about Freshdesk?

Looking to scale it soon, need to know if I'm making a mistake!

I'll maybe add a wee video.

Tickets are created via a form.

Tickets go onto your dashboard.

When you reply the submitter gets an email notification.

When the submitter replies you get an email notification.

So on and so forth until you mark the ticket as resolved.

This is really cool, the missing functionality that I haven't added to https://supportpage.io/ yet :p

Thanks!

But where's your support page?

haha it's actually linked right there on the homepage :-)

Is the site offline at the moment? I can’t view it on iPhone safari. Safari says the address is invalid.

hmm cheers I'll look into this. Should be fine though....

Hello. It seems to be blocked by NextDNS. If the domain was just registered that will be the issue. It will work after a while.

Thanks for clarifying :-)

Who are your top competitors?

2. Customise your support page colors. Where is the support page I can see? Is the website demoing what it does? I don't understand how it works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com