Abandoned tickets pile up, members sit waiting for an answer that never comes, and people open tickets at 3am. Two inactivity timers handle the first two problems. Working hours handle the third.
Two timers, not one
OnyxBot keeps track of whether staff owe the ticket a reply, then runs one of two systems on it. Never both, because a ticket is only ever waiting on one side.
- Auto-close after inactivity covers the member going quiet, meaning staff or the AI replied last. It reminds the member, then closes the ticket.
- Alert staff after covers staff going quiet, meaning a member is waiting on a reply from your team. It pings staff and does nothing else.
Both live on the category, on Tickets, then Panels, and both are off until you put a number in them. Neither implies the other: run one, run both, or run neither. The important consequence is that a ticket waiting on staff is never reminded and never auto-closed. The member did nothing wrong by waiting, and closing their ticket over a delay that is yours is how a support desk loses people quietly.
Auto-close
Set Auto-close after inactivity on any category, in hours. When a ticket the member owes a reply on has had no human message for that long, OnyxBot posts a warning that pings the opener: reply to keep it open. If the ticket stays silent for another 12 hours, it closes with reason "inactivity."
Details worth knowing:
- Only member and staff messages reset the clock. An unanswered AI reply still counts as a quiet ticket.
- Any reply after the warning cancels it completely.
- Inactivity closes skip the review prompt; nobody gets asked to rate a ticket they abandoned.
- Leave the field empty to never auto-close.
Staff alerts
Set Alert staff after on the same category, in hours. Once a member has waited that long with no staff reply, OnyxBot posts one alert in the ticket and pings the staff roles for that category, guild-wide ones included, or just the claimer when someone has claimed it. That is the whole behaviour: nothing is warned, nothing closes, the ticket itself is untouched.
Details worth knowing:
- The wait starts when the member starts waiting, not when they last chased it. A member who follows up three times still shows the full wait from their original question, so the people waiting most visibly are the ones the alert fires on soonest.
- The first reply counts. A ticket that opens with nobody about to answer it starts waiting the moment it is created: a category with the AI off, and every hand-off from a public channel. A ticket whose whole story is in the intake answers is still a member waiting on you, even though they have not typed a message in it.
- One alert per wait. A staff reply ends the wait, and the next stretch of silence after it earns a fresh one.
- Claiming restarts the wait rather than ending it. The claimer gets the full window from the moment they take the ticket, then an alert of their own if it goes quiet, so claiming can never hide a ticket.
- An AI answer ends the wait, because the member now has something to read, but it never counts as the staff reply. A ticket the assistant never answered at all, because it hit an error or ran out of credit, keeps waiting and still reaches you.
- Leave the field empty to turn the alert off.
One place to see everything waiting. On Tickets, then Settings, set a Staff alerts channel and every alert is mirrored there as a link with no ping, so a lead can see what is overdue without sitting in every ticket. The ping stays in the ticket, where the people who can answer it are.
What applies to both
- Pinned tickets sit out both.
/ticket pinexempts a ticket from the reminder, from auto-close and from the staff alert, for as long as the pin is on. It is for the ticket that is genuinely parked, waiting on a refund, a build, or somebody who is away./ticket unpinrestarts both clocks from that moment, so a ticket that sat pinned for a fortnight is not warned and closed the second it comes off. See the command reference for the rest of what pinning does. - Both work from what OnyxBot sees, not from what it stores. The wait is recorded as it happens, on every message the bot reads, so servers with Transcript retention off get both timers in full. The one gap is tickets that were already open before these timers existed and have no stored history to read back: they start out treated as waiting on the member, and the next message from either side settles it.
- Both notices are yours to rewrite. The inactivity warning and the staff attention alert each have an entry on the Messages page, with the placeholders they carry. Removing the mention from either one removes the ping with it.
Working hours
On Tickets, then Settings, set a weekly schedule and timezone, then pick what happens outside those hours:
- Open tickets with an offline note (default): tickets always open, the AI always answers, and the welcome message tells members that replies may take longer. You can rewrite that line yourself.
- Block new tickets: members can't open new tickets from panels; instead they see your offline message privately, right where they clicked. Tickets opened as hand-offs from public channels still go through, so members the AI couldn't help are never stranded.