Comments

Allan Ross

Is anyone as upset as I am with the changes to the comments feature?  My clients are all over me because now all comments entered in a day can not be printed together, they all have to be printed individually. 

Jeff K.

Ask them to use the "Print Thread" button instead of "Print Comments"

Robert Jack

We are livid with the new unsolicited and unwanted changes.

Essentially, the new feature does 3 things that are not great.

 

Firstly, everything has been reversed in terms of date so the oldest comment is now at the top rather than the most recent - which is not useful when viewing the latest position.

 

Secondly, you now have to click "See more" to view the full comments instead of automatically seeing it all. Why add an extra click ?

 

Thirdly, they seem to have arbitrarily grouped all further comments under the original comment, whether directly related or not. This is nonsense.

 

We are now seriously looking at an lternative tool as this latest change to historical data is ridiculous.

Jim Hook

Robert, I'm with you on this one and just posted another discussion making the same points. We used Discussions for unrelated notes and now they are all replies to the first one, shown in reverse order, often hidden, requiring clicks to see more or view n previous items. People are having a hard time finding things they could just previously scroll down to. This change was uncalled for and will take many months for the confusion to work its way out of our system as current projects close. I'm surprised Smartsheet would make an incompatible change to something like this without giving the users the option of keeping the old way or switching to the new way.

Paul H

I have to click see more over and over the read a damn comments section. I cannot understand how anyone could think this was a good idea.

Rob van Dijk

I agree with Robert Jack, especially with first and second point:

 

it's really not helping at all that the oldest comment is on top: you always have to click extra on 'see more' and there is no 'see less'!

 

 

Alex Vorobiev

We really appreciate everyone's feedback and apologize for any inconvenience the changes may have caused.  I can assure you that the decisions to make these changes were not made lightly, but I certainly understand that they may feel jarring and even counterproductive, especially if you are used to and have come to rely on the old format.

 

We are definitely listening and are closely monitoring all the feedback to understand the impact on the customers and capture and investigate all concerns.  Please keep your feedback coming.  I just posted a response to Robert's thoughtful comments in a separate thread here https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/release-2016-08-06-comments-feature-request-loss-functionality.

 

In terms of having to click "See more" link - we will be looking at ways to balance the need to see more comments at a glance vs. being able to view comments in their entirety.

 

Thanks again!

Jim Hook

Alex,

 

Making something incompatible with existing usage should not even be considered without giving users a choice unless the change is basically trivial to adjust to. I don't know how many users will post their objections in the Community but I haven't noticed anyone saying that the new comments view is great, just complaints.

Allan Ross

Alexit is not that we are upset with  change itself, if a change had been made which made it easier to use or more organized there would not be a problem. The issue is that it has made it harder to use, less organized, and more complicated. As far as making it impossible to see the entire comment, and by entire I mean beyond the first 3-7 lines,   without clicking "see more" I'd like to know how many complaints you got from people upset with having to scroll through the top coments to get to older ones below? My guess is not many.

Jim Hook

One thing Smartsheet could have done that would have made the update less annoying would have been to treat all the existing discussion items as new comments instead of replies to the first one at the transition last Saturday. That would have preserved the top down order that previously existed and still have given people the ability to reply to a comment if they wanted. This change was not properly thought out and needs to be reversed until they can implement it in a way that doesn't destroy something that people count on.

 

I think I just discovered another annoying thing in the new comments feature--I don't see a way to delete all the comments in a single operation like you used to be able to do in Discussions. On my most heavily used page I use the same project information row over and over again. I have my system set up to handle a maximum of 100 active projects and the information rows link data to other sheets including hours by role, financial information, etc. To avoid having to recreate new projects from scratch each time I archive the old project info and then clear it out for use on the next project. Now, if a project has 25 notes in the comments I apparently have to delete them one at a time before the comments area can be reused for a new project. Now that's annoying!!

Robert Jack

I agree Jim. As a bare minum, having the comments ungrouped would be a major improvement to the current format. Whislt the "see more" would remain an ongoing frustration, at least our content would be returned to some semblance of normality.

 

Again, echoing previous comments, our main issue here is the enforcement of the change, as much as the change itself.

Alex Vorobiev

Hear you loud and clear, and appreciate your feedback.  

 

My team and I have been focused 100% in the last two days on customer feedback, and we are looking at options to mitigate the concerns that have been expressed.  Most immediately, we are working on a fix to add aditional context (primary column value) to notifications, and looking to release that today or tomorrow.  We are listening to your feedback and appreciate your patience!

 

 

Jim Hook

Alex,

 

The Delete thread will definitely help delete the many unrelated notes, yet displayed as replies, on Discussions that were converted to Comments by the update. Going forward the many comments that are each their own thread will still involve a lot of clicks to clear them out. Having a way to delete them all at once, like in Discussions, is still very desirable. I would also like the option of not having to "See more" or "view n previous replies" but just simply scroll down to see all the threads. It is very likely that the way we use Comments each post will be its own thread--the old Discussions was perfect for us.

Stephanie Pepp

I have spent hours trying to re-train all of my employees on properly updating the new comments. I absolutely hate it. The Discussions were used tremendously by everyone in my company and now it has turned into a nightmare trying to respond to the correct discussion, let alone trying to read everything by constantly clicking show more.

 

I am hoping that this rollout turns into an epic fail and we can return to something that was such a great feature before. I can't even try to give improvement suggestions because every aspect of this change is awful. 

 

 

Alex Vorobiev

JIm - if you want to continue using comments the way you used discussions, then you can create threads where the parent comment is short, and for all intents and purposes serves as your thread title.  Then you can add replies to that comment to thread them below.  The sort order change and collapsed replies aside (something we are looking into, as I mentioned earlier), you would achieve more or less the same discussion structure you had before.

 

If you have a flat comment feed, you are absolutely right - there is currently no way to delete all comments (i.e., all threads).  This is no different from the earlier behavior where there was no way to delete all discussions in a single go.

 

I will take a note of your request to be able to delete all threads at once.

Robert Jack

Alex, you are completely missing the point in your response to Jim.

The issues we are raising are only partly in relation to using the new feature moving forward (Jim's specific query on deleting is an example of such an item).

You describe a way if using the new comments feature that will enable all of us to maintain separate threads as we did with discussions. This is fine and is not contentious (aside from the major issue of "see more" which you seem to think is trivial).

The main crux of almost everyon'es feedback here is your arbitrary grouping of previous discussion topics into a single comment thread. Please allow us to ungroup and return the list to it's previous format. Only then can we effectively us the working method you describe moving forward.