Messages and support

Every signed-in page has a way to reach us. Ask a question, report a bug, or send an idea, and the reply comes back in the app, and in your email too if this site is set up to send it. There is no ticket number and no queue: it is a conversation with the person who builds BackTalk.

Two ways in

• The message button. The round button in the bottom-right corner of any app page opens a short compose card. It is not there on the two messaging surfaces themselves, /app/messages and Admin → Inbox, where a launcher for the page you are already on would be noise. There is no subject field, on purpose: at the moment you have something to say, being asked to title it is friction. The first line of what you write becomes the subject.
• Your account menu, then Messages. The full page at /app/messages holds your conversations with us, oldest to newest inside each one. Anything with a reply you have not read yet sorts to the top, and the page opens on the first of them, so the answer you have been waiting for is the one already on screen.

Both start the same kind of thread. The button is for the thought you have right now; the page is where you go back to read the answer.

One conversation per topic

A billing question and a bug report are separate conversations, not one long thread. New message on the Messages page starts a fresh topic with its own subject, and each conversation keeps its own reply box, so an answer never lands under the wrong question.

Each conversation carries a status:

• Open: waiting on us.
• Replied: we have answered.
• Closed: finished. Writing in a closed conversation reopens it, so nothing is ever a dead end.

Adding a screenshot

A visual bug is quicker to show than to describe, so a message can carry images. Three ways to add one, all of them on the reply box and on the New message form:

• The paperclip. Opens your file picker.
• Drag and drop. Drop the file anywhere on the composer.
• Paste. Take a screenshot, then paste straight into the message box. This is the fast one: on a Mac that is Cmd+Shift+4 followed by Cmd+V, and nothing needs saving to disk first.

Pasting ordinary text still pastes text. The composer only intercepts a paste that is actually carrying an image, so a stack trace or a block of config arrives with its line breaks and its indentation intact, which is the whole reason it was worth pasting.

Up to five images per message, 10 MB each, as PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP. Anything outside that is refused as you attach it, saying which rule it broke, rather than failing later when you press Send. Each image appears as a thumbnail in the composer with a small cross to remove it before sending, and once sent it sits under the message where either side can click it to see it full size.

An image needs a message to go with it: a line of text explaining what you are looking at is the difference between a screenshot we can act on and one we have to ask about. Attaching a file and pressing Send with an empty box says so.

Your images are private. They are stored in a private bucket, not on a public URL, and are readable only by you and the BackTalk team. Nothing is guessable and nothing is indexed, so an image never leaks by someone finding the link. Anything you pick but never send is deleted automatically within a day.

The message button in the corner has no attach control, on purpose: it is deliberately the lightest thing on the page, and loading an uploader into every signed-in route for the rare moment someone wants one is a poor trade. Use /app/messages when you have a screenshot to send.

Where the reply arrives

When we answer, the reply appears in the app. That part always happens. If this site is set up to send email, it arrives in your inbox as well, and the email is not a copy of a ticket system: every message in one conversation chains onto the last, so Gmail and other clients keep the whole exchange in a single thread rather than scattering it as unrelated messages. Reply-by-email is not wired up yet, so answer from the app, but the record in your inbox stays readable.

A count on the message button and on the Messages item in your account menu says how many conversations have something new in them. Opening a conversation clears it.

Opening a conversation also tells us you have read the reply, and the team can see that. It is one word next to their own message, "Read", with no timestamp attached. It exists so we know an answer actually landed rather than wondering whether it went astray. Nothing flows the other way: you are never shown when we read one of yours, because "read but not replied" would be a needling detail on a queue answered by a person rather than a rota.

It updates while you watch

You do not need to refresh. A reply appears in the conversation you have open, with a New divider above it so a message arriving under something you were already reading is not easy to miss. Under the name of whoever you are talking to sits a plain reply-time estimate, not a live status light: telling you which accounts are online right now would mean handing your browser the list of who the operators are, and knowing that an answer is a day away is the useful part anyway.

What context a message carries

Separately from anything you attach yourself, and so we can help without a round of "which workspace, which plan, which page", a message carries a small snapshot of what was true when you sent it:

• your workspace name and your role in it,
• your plan,
• the page you were on when you wrote.

That is the whole of what is collected for you: no keywords, no signals, no workspace content. The snapshot is frozen at send time, so upgrading a plan later does not rewrite the history of a conversation.

Limits and availability

A handful of messages in a few minutes is the cap, which no genuine conversation reaches; it exists so an automated client cannot flood the inbox. Attaching a file does not count against it, so a retry after a dropped upload never costs you the message it belonged to. Everyone can write in, whatever their role and whatever state their workspace is in: a viewer can send a message, and so can a member whose workspace is past due or read-only. Support is never the thing that gets cut off.

Not signed in, or writing about an account you cannot reach? The contact form is the public route. It emails the same team, but it does not open an in-app conversation and it takes no images: there is no thread on your Messages page, no threaded reply and no way to show us the screen you are describing. Sign in and use the message button, or /app/messages, when you want any of those.