Collision Detection

Collision detection — who else is in this ticket

Sarah opens VWU-080 and starts writing a reply about the VPN. A minute later you open the same ticket, see nobody has answered, and start writing your own. The customer gets two replies that don't quite agree, and one of you has wasted ten minutes.

It happens on every busy morning, and most of all in Unassigned, where several people triage the same list at once. Until now nothing in FreeITSM said a word about it.

Now the ticket tells you.

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What you see

Open a ticket somebody else already has open, and a line appears under the ticket header:

JS James Smith is also viewing this ticket

That's the quiet version — someone is reading, which is worth knowing and nothing more. It sits just above the action buttons, so it's in your eye-line on the way to Reply.

If they are actually writing — a reply, a forward or a note — the same line turns amber and says so:

JS James Smith is writing a reply…

That's the moment your work becomes duplicated effort, so it gets the louder treatment.

Several people at once are all listed, with the writers named first: "Sarah Williams is writing a reply… Raj Patel and Laura Brown are also viewing this ticket."

In the reply window

If you click Reply while a colleague is mid-reply, the composer repeats the warning above the To field:

⚠️ James Smith is writing a reply to this ticket right now — check with them before you send.

It appears and disappears live, because the person you'd collide with may start or finish typing while you're drafting.

It warns — it never blocks

Nothing is greyed out. Nothing is locked. You can send anyway.

That's deliberate. Two analysts genuinely do sometimes both need to write on one ticket — someone sends a holding reply while someone else escalates to the supplier — and a lock would be wrong most of the times it fired. It would also need an owner, a timeout, a way to take it off somebody who went to lunch, and a way to explain a greyed-out button to the person staring at it.

So FreeITSM tells you what it knows and leaves the decision with you. Usually you'll message the other person; occasionally you'll carry on. Both are fine, and only you know which.

Good to know

• It updates on its own. A colleague opening the ticket, starting to type, finishing, or closing it shows up within a few seconds without you refreshing anything.
• You never see yourself. The strip only ever lists other people.
• Ghosts clean themselves up. If someone closes the tab, their browser crashes, their laptop sleeps or the network drops, they simply stop being shown a few seconds later. Nothing is left sitting on a ticket claiming to be there, and nobody has to clear anything.
• A tab you've switched away from doesn't count as being there. A ticket left open in a background tab all afternoon won't announce you to the rest of the desk. Come back to it and you reappear.
• It respects company access. On a multi-company install you are never shown a colleague's name against a ticket you couldn't open yourself. See Multi-Tenancy.
• A note counts as writing. Not just replies — a colleague adding an internal note is doing work you might be about to duplicate.

What it deliberately doesn't do

• It's not a history. FreeITSM does not keep a record of who looked at which ticket. The information behind this feature is overwritten every few seconds and thrown away — it can tell you who is here now, and can never answer "who read this ticket last Tuesday". That's a different feature with very different questions attached, and it isn't this one.
• It's not on the ticket list. The strip appears when you open a ticket, not as a marker on rows in the list.
• It's Tickets only for now.
• It doesn't stop two people replying — see above. It tells you; it doesn't decide.

Turning it off

There's no setting. It costs nothing when you're the only person on a ticket (no strip appears at all), and the whole point is that it's there on the one morning it matters. If it ever became a nuisance for your desk, say so and it can be given a switch.

See also

• Tickets — the inbox this lives in
• Collision detection — Developer Guide — how it works under the hood
• Selecting several tickets — the other way to stop duplicating effort on a busy morning
• Snoozing tickets — getting the tickets you can't work out of the way