Linking comments to text | Feature requests

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Linking comments to text

planned

Dee Warring

It is too difficult to work out which comments apply to which content.

March 1, 2021

Hannah Cook

James Peacock thanks for the update that's looking great. Our team have all had a look at the video and agree it's an improvement. One thought we had though was that when you see all the comments it might be easier that they are in order of the content they comment on rather than in order of when people commented.

James Peacock

Hannah Cook: Hi Hannah, thanks for the feedback - that's great to hear. Yes the sorting of conversations is something we're discussing internally too. I can see situations where both are valid, so we'll look into being able to set that as an option.

James Peacock

Hi everyone. We've been designing some improvements to commenting that will really help resolve the issues a lot of you are currently facing. If you can spare 5 minutes you can watch this demonstration I've recorded taking you through the proposed changes.
This is a bit of a step up from merely bug fixing, so will take longer to implement, but I'm confident the changes will improve a lot of things involving commenting in general.
I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Linda Moon

James Peacock: I like that the comments won’t be overlapped on top of each other anymore and the hover text is a nice feature. I do have a follow-up question and that is if we get an email notification saying another contributor has commented on an item, and we click “view item” will it take us directly to the place in the item where that comment is referring to? Currently it just takes us to the time but we have to manually search for where the comment is.

James Peacock

Linda Moon: Hi Linda. Yes this is something we're aware of, and we've actually started work on the fix but it hasn't been as straight forward as we'd hoped. I'll keep you updated once I have more to share.

Hannah Cook

James Peacock that's really great news, thanks James!

James Peacock

marked this post as

planned

Hi everyone. After reviewing the issue internally we have identified it as a bug, and so are now treating it as such. It has become more widespread due to the recent release of inline images, which are causing conversations to become misaligned.
I'll keep this request open to update you on our progress, but if you encounter any future issues with conversation alignment please to reach out to our support team, as we don't actively monitor this feature request system for bugs.
Thanks!

Hannah Cook

Hi James Peacock. Can I send a video privately so I'm not sharing our content with everyone? thanks :-)

James Peacock

Hannah Cook: Hi Hannah, absolutely. I'll reach out to you privately.

Hannah Cook

James Peacock: awesome thanks. have emailed a video to you. Let me know if it doesn't arrive :-)

James Peacock

Hi everyone. It seems as though this issue is gaining more attention... Are you able to share a screenshot or recording of the issue so we can determine its severity? It will also help determine whether this is actually a bug. I'm struggling to reproduce the issue locally, but understand real world use cases can differ wildly, so any examples you can share will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Catherine Zulver

Agree! It's not a cache or connection issue either - it's an ongoing problem my whole team shares. Goal: easily match text to comments AND comments to text. Currently clicking the comment doesn't take you to the content it's about.

Hannah Cook

I was just about to raise this issue but I see i have already voted it on it!
I'll add my experience here:
When I click on a line of text that has a comment on it, it is difficult to see which comment is associated with that line of text. I think the comment changes to a slightly different shade of grey, but it is not obvious enough. The comments also move, but it doesn't seem to bring the comment into alignment with the text - it seems to put the comment at the top of the page, even if the text that i have clicked is further down the page.
This is particularly confusing if there are multiple comments on a page (which there always are!).

Tamsin Ewing

Hannah Cook: Agreed. The experience trying to figure out which piece of text the comment is referring to can drive you nuts!

And the more comments there are, the longer they take to open.

Dee Warring

That's a possible solution. Meanwhile I have been thinking I will need to refer more explicitly to the text in my comments so the SMEs know which part of the page I am referring to. It's frustrating though and I wish comments had a leader line linking them to their content.

Theresa Bassey-Effiok

Agreed. In normal circumstances, the associate content is highlighted a deeper yellow when you click on a comment box, but this doesn't always work when you have an item with lots of comments on it, and the page itself becomes slower to operate. It would be better if comments worked in a similar way to Microsoft Word's commenting system, i.e. highlighted content with a speech bubble symbol next to it, which – when clicked on – loads up the comment. That failing, the comments could be collapsed totally by default to just the heading bar of author, date/time, etc., then expanded – and content highlighted – when clicked on.

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