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A few of our major customers who we do ongoing work for, are used to having their own access to the bug tracker. Now that we've switched to FogBugz, this could get very expensive for us if we need to add 5-6 customer accounts as we have to pay for them individually. I realise that customers can email in bugs or we could use the API to create an interface like the one I'm using now, but that would make it very hard for them to track what they need to test if they've got 100 issues open on a major software project as they can only track one bug at a time - and they need to have the original email reply in order to do so.

What we really need is a way to give our customers a real login, that doesn't use up our paid licenses. Perhaps these accounts could be put in a Group which is restricted so they can't log time against anything, or resolve issues or use any 'developer' type features. They would need to be able to close issues marked as resolved by a paid account. It could be a matter of allowing what you call "community users" to be able to create new bugs and perhaps mark them as "closed" once they've verified it's been fixed (this is an important part of our workflow that the customer can test and close the issue themselves). This would also help offset the cost difference between FogBugz and Gemini (which comes with unlimited accounts at a similar price point to the FogBugz 10 user license).

I presume there's no other simple way of achieving this?

Fog Creek Case FC2036667

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We are working on enhancements / revamping the public case submission and the ways that Community Users can be used. Does this question and its answers cover your needs? The only thing I see missing from the spec we have the the case I opened for that question is cases resolving back to the Community User. FogBugz doesn't allow cases to be assigned to a user who can't log in (a non-normal or admin user) so this wouldn't be possible, but there may be ways to meet your functional needs without that. I would be happy to discuss your use case in detail.

Feel free to comment here or send me an email.

I wanted to add Sergei's comment to the answer here:

You could also email your customer/client with instructions on what they need to do, and they could email you back with the results, referencing the case #'s. You can mark it as resolved when sending to the customer and assign to a virtual user "pending response" or something, then it will re-activate it when the reply is received and re-assign to whoever you want (based on workflow), and then that person can resolve the case / close the case / resolve+assign to someone else to close. It's definitely not ideal for everyone's preexisting workflow

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I think we would need the bugs to be directly assignable to the user. In fact we sometimes raise things the customer needs to do - like test something or provide some new data. Due to how hard it is to use FogBugz as a support ticket system (as opposed to project management) we've actually just cancelled our OnDemand account but I thought I'd reply anyway. We might come back if support for customer accounts is improved in the future but currently we'd have to buy our customers a license each and that would cost a fortune. Hmm, I've run out of characters to say what I wanted here. – Nick G Aug 17 2010 at 13:49
Allowing customers to edit cases circumvents our licensing, so it's pretty unlikely you'll see that. There are workarounds such as using a Virtual User to assign cases to so you know it's in the customer's court, or to let your customers share a login or logins so you only need one license for each logical group of customers. Let me know if I can help you find a workable scenario here. – adambox♦ Aug 18 2010 at 14:36
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 You could also email your customer/client with instructions on what they need to do, and they could email you back with the results, referencing the case #'s. You can mark it as resolved when sending to the customer and assign to a virtual user "pending response" or something, then it will re-activate it when the reply is received and re-assign to whoever you want (based on workflow), and then that person can resolve the case / close the case / resolve+assign to someone else to close. It's definitely not ideal for everyone's preexisting workflow. – Sergei Oct 8 2010 at 0:23
thanks, @sergei. I added your comment to my answer – adambox♦ Oct 11 2010 at 13:50

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