Announcements & support

TubePress brings two cloud channels into your admin — a product announcement bar and a support ticket desk — alongside a built-in, offline Help Center. The announcement bar and the Help Center need no account; opening support tickets requires a connected account.

This page explains each one, how tickets work, and how the support flow handles screenshots and credentials safely.

Product announcements

A slim notice bar sits at the top of the admin, fed by a broadcast feed from the TubePress network (the public announcements endpoint on tubepress.io). It is how product news, maintenance notices and important alerts reach you. The bar is non-dismissible by design so a critical notice is not missed.

It is built to stay out of your way and never slow the admin:

• Never blocks a page. The first paint comes from a local cache, so the admin renders instantly even if the network is down.
• Refreshes live. A lightweight poll (every 20 seconds, and whenever you refocus the tab) swaps the bar in place only when the content actually changes.
• Safe by default. Each notice carries a colour and an optional link; the remote payload is treated as untrusted and sanitised, and at most a handful of notices show at once.

The help center

The Help Center is a built-in drawer in the admin: a categorised library of how-to articles and a quick product tour, all served locally from your install with no account or network required. It covers getting started, adding and importing videos, organising your catalogue, appearance and branding, storage and transcoding, users and community, security, SEO, and languages and pages — a fast in-context companion to this documentation site.

The support widget

A floating Support button appears on every admin page. Open it for a chat-style panel where you raise and track tickets without leaving the admin. Support is a connected-account feature: if your site is not yet linked, the widget shows the same connect flow as the catalogue — you can link right there (see connect an account).

Everything the widget does runs through same-origin, CSRF-protected, admin-only endpoints that relay to tubepress.io over the existing signed channel. Your API keys stay server-side; nothing sensitive is exposed to the browser.

Opening & tracking tickets

Hit New ticket and fill in a short form:

1. Subject & message. A one-line summary plus the details — what happened, what you expected, and steps to reproduce.
2. Category & priority. Choose a category (bug, question, billing, account, feature request or other) and a priority (low, normal, high or urgent).
3. Send. The ticket opens and the conversation thread appears.

Your tickets list shows a status pill on each: In progress, Reply needed, Resolved or Closed. Open a thread and it polls every few seconds so staff replies arrive in near real time without clobbering a half-typed message. A badge on the Support button counts tickets awaiting your reply, and replying to a closed ticket reopens it. Useful diagnostics — your domain, CMS and PHP versions, and a health report — are attached automatically so support can help faster.

Attachments & screenshots

A picture saves a lot of back-and-forth. You can attach up to six images per message, each up to 5 MB, in PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF. Uploads are validated server-side as genuine images before they are accepted, and you view them back through a private admin proxy.

Sharing credentials securely

So support can actually sign in, reproduce and fix the issue, an admin login and password are required on every ticket. For problems that need server-level access, you may optionally add a server IP, SSH user and password — only when the issue calls for it.

Response & limits

Support is provided through your connected account; the widget notes that replies usually arrive within a day. Attachments follow the limits above — six images per message, 5 MB each, image formats only — and tickets relay to tubepress.io, which applies fair-use limits to keep the service healthy. If the desk is briefly unreachable, the widget says so plainly; just try again shortly.

Next steps