Having the servicedesk agent being the middleman is probably the right way to go for very large organizations but for small, agile orgs it just creates overhead. Would really appreciate this feature.

I would also add that Atlassian shouldn't wait for a certain number of votes before implementing this. Had we know of this limitation we would have never chosen Service Desk. Sadly it was something that we didn't discover until well into our use of it.

while this fix would be a step in the right direction. I would also like to see a Project Option to allow all collaborator comments be seen on the portal view rather than having to have agents be the middlemen. 

We have the same problem as Timothy has described. It would be a great advance if collaborators could add comments to the customers issues and also I don’t think is going to be a problem for the business case in terms of licenses.

I support this 100%. I have several customers who want 2nd line support, collaborators to be able to communicate directly with customers. Collaborators should still not be able to work on SD issues, see the queues, etc. 

But often they want/need to communicate directly to the customer. If you made the customer comment field available to collaborators this would solve the problem. I have actually had customer decide not to use SD because of this. 

I don't really think this would break the business case for the licensing as agents still need to process the requests. There may be a few cases, and I mean few, where they take fewer agent licenses but this is probably offset by more deciding to go with SD instead of another product. 

I have three real scenarios where this was a deal breaker for customers. 

registrations8, created a new ticket for it: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSD-1950

That's a better description. Thanks for editing that.

(I'm not adverse to the other interpretation - allowing collabs to make public comments, but it would be a different ticket)

registrations8, sorry for the wrong interpretation of the original description. I made some changes to the description. See if it's accurate enough.

Mogavenasan,

In editing the original ticket you have changed the request to something completely different. I wasn't asking for the collaborators to be able to create public comments directly, I was asking for the ability as an agent to promote a specific comment created by a collaborator to be a public comment. The workflow represented here (the ability for the agent to decide what to promote to public) is the key aspect - I don't want my collaborators to be able to make a public comment.

The ability for a collaborator to make a public comment is a different problem/workflow requirement.

I'd rather see it a general configuration functionality, which allows us to define whether a collaborator can decide on whether his/her comment is visible to customers or is only visible internally.