Hi Gerald,
Adding a note won't change the state (at least not in 2.4, I don't know if this behaviour is changed in 3.0). OTRS believes a ticket is new until an agent has contacted the customer in some way, either by mail or phone (both from within OTRS). Then it is changed to the open state.
As you mentioned, a Generic Agent can change the state from New to something else, but a simpler way of handling that is just changing the StateDefault for new tickets to "open", if you never want to see the "new" state. Personally I advise against that, because "new" is a great way of finding tickets that needs to be responded to.
Lars
From: otrs-bounces@otrs.org [mailto:otrs-bounces@otrs.org] On Behalf Of Gerald Young
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 5:30 AM
To: User questions and discussions about OTRS.
Subject: Re: [otrs] Can't get ticket to change state
No, it's not stupid. A ticket won't change from "New" (by default) forever. ... unless ... the ticket has been replied to or some other action (adding a note? or closing it) that would update the ticket besides "only" being locked. The idea being that a ticket that's sitting as "New" is one that isn't being worked on, yet.
Another way to change the ticket state from New is by Generic Agent.
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Clayton Doty