Integrating Daily NYT Letter Boxed Puzzle Data with osTicket Any Suggestions?

hellencharless54

Hi everyone,

I’ve been using osTicket for support and workflow management, but I’m exploring a slightly unconventional idea and hoping the community might have insights or suggestions.

I’m building a tracking system for the daily NYT Letter Boxed puzzle — where users log their solves, submit solutions, and we generate some analytics (e.g., solve times, two‑word solution percentage, difficulty, etc.). I’d like to integrate this with osTicket in a way where:

🔹 Users can submit their daily Letter Boxed results as tickets
🔹 The ticket form includes custom fields like Puzzle Date, Solution Words, Solve Time
🔹 Staff/admin can review and tag tickets automatically (e.g., “Solved in 2 words”)
🔹 Daily puzzle data could be updated automatically, and tickets could be grouped by date or status

What I’m Looking For Help With

Custom Ticket Forms
What’s the best way to configure custom fields for:

Puzzle date

Puzzle grid letters

Word solutions

Solve statistics

Automatic Tagging / Routing
Is there a recommended method (plugin or custom script) to:

Automatically tag or classify incoming tickets based on certain field values (e.g., if “Solution Count = 2” then tag “Two‑Word Solve”)

Scheduled Updates / Automation
I’m considering a script that fetches daily Letter Boxed puzzle data — what’s the best practice to:

Trigger scripts outside of osTicket

Feed results into custom fields or dashboards within osTicket

Reporting / Analytics
Ideally, I want to generate simple reports like:

Average solve time per week

Percentage of two‑word solves

Most common words submitted

If anyone has experience with customizing ticket workflows, automation, or integrating external data sources into osTicket, I’d really appreciate your thoughts!

Thanks in advance! 😊

KevinTheJedi

hellencharless54

I cannot and do not suggest any 3rd party plugins, mods, etc. They almost always causes issues and deviate from core. If you decide to use any of said mods, etc. you will proceed at your own risk. If you run into any issues with said 3rd party plugins, mods, etc. then you cannot use this forum to request assistance as you are no longer using pure vanilla osTicket. This forum is for core osTicket and core osTicket plugins only.

Custom Ticket Forms
- Super easy. You can modify the built-in Ticket Details Form (important note is only fields added on this form can be exported in CSV). You can also add any number of custom forms with any number of custom fields. You can then attach the custom forms to Help Topics so they are automatically added to web/api tickets or can be manually added to tickets.
Automatic Tagging / Routing
- We don't have tags so, no. We do have the concept of Ticket Filters that only fire on New Ticket creation but the actions are the following:
Scheduled Updates / Automation
- You trigger external scripts however you want outside of osTicket; as they live outside of osTicket. If you must feed data into osTicket from outside you'll need to do some heavy modifications as we only allow Ticket Creation via API, Web, Email and updates via web or email.
Reporting / Analytics (link 1 and link 2)
- We do have dashboard reports that are historical overviews of various metrics. We also have CSV exports (I touched on above). That's about it. If you need super detailed reports then I would suggest connecting something like Metabase or whatever to the database to run whatever reports you want.

Cheers.