Edit: Looks like they're fixing the problem after all. It's unfortunate that it took a Hacker News article to bring attention to the problem, but at least they're taking the appropriate steps.
>The reason why the content itself is not served under https is precisely to avoid the SSL warning.
That annoying warning is the hearth of the secure connection. It surprises me how people choose an easy way and doesn't care about "doing things right"
I don't know that this is supposed to be a customer-service system, though.
I believe Tender designed it this way because, at least in our experience, 99% of the time after we reply, we never hear from the OP again. So by always closing the discussion after we answer, it keeps our queue clean and lets us clearly see what discussions are still open awaiting our response.
Anyone can always re-open the discussion if they feel they have more to add. It's not meant in any way to try to discourage discussion. We could just delete it if that's what we had wanted to do. :)
Having read your post I can see the merits but if I were a user who does not know about your workflow it would make me very angry.
Why can you just not have the ticket auto-close after your reply and X days have passed, you can change your internal list to only show tickets that are open and last updated to by the customer?