A private backlog, and ten replies you don't have to write

Every team keeps a second, invisible roadmap. It lives in a notes app, a pinned Slack message, or somebody's head — all the things you've decided to do eventually, kept off the public board because putting them there would read as a promise.

Two changes today. Your feedback board gets somewhere honest to keep that list, and canned responses stop starting from a blank page.

Backlog: the column before Open

The board has a new first column, Backlog, for work you've triaged but haven't scheduled. It sits ahead of Open, and moving a post out of it is what publishes it.

It's opt-in. Turn it on in Project Settings → Features → Backlog column and it appears on your console board only. Your public portal never shows it — not the column, and not the posts in it. Backlog means "written down, not announced", and a public Backlog column would defeat the point.

Switch it back off and nothing is lost: the column stays for as long as posts are still sitting in it.

Private posts

Any post can now be private. A private post lives on your console board and nowhere else — absent from the public portal, its permalink returns a 404, and nobody can vote or comment on it. That's one rule, and it holds at every point a visitor could reach a post, not just the board.

Feedback your team writes starts private by default. That's the second new setting, New feedback starts private, sitting under the same Feedback board switch. Untick the box as you create a post to publish it straight away, or flip it later from the post itself.

What customers send you through the portal or the API is always public — a request belongs on the board it was submitted to. Both settings behave the same way in the mobile app, and private posts stay visible through your project API key and MCP server, which are your credentials and see the whole board.

Ten replies you don't have to write

Canned responses used to start empty. Now a gallery of ten starter templates sits above your list: /welcome, /ack, /refund, /feature, /bug, /escalate, /follow-up, /resolved, /ooo, and /password — covering general replies, billing, bug reports, feature requests, escalation, and account help.

Preview any of them and add them one at a time; the ones you skip stay in the gallery, and the ones you take disappear from it. Each arrives already translated into all eleven interface languages, and each uses the same placeholders your own saved replies do — {{customer_name}}, {{customer_email}}, {{thread_subject}}, {{agent_name}}, and {{project_name}} — filled in at the moment you insert one into a reply. Adding templates is an owner and admin action, like everything else in canned responses.

Free includes five saved replies per project, so pick the five you'll reach for most. Pro raises that to fifty; Team is unlimited.

Get started

1. Open Project Settings → Features and turn on Backlog column.
2. Decide whether new feedback should start private — it does by default.
3. Open Canned responses in the project sidebar and add the templates you want.

Feedback board docs · Canned responses docs · Get started at supdesk.app