Comments

Jim Hook

Alex, there absolutely was a way to delete all the discussions in a single go and I've done it hundreds of times. There was a slelect button with the discussion title that let you choose to delete the entire discussion. In discussions I didn't have to click see more and view n previous replies before I could click-drag over them all for archiving with Cmd-c. Comments only allows you to delete individual threads so if I have 20 threads in comments I will have to delete each one individually.

 

The new comments may work well for some users but it fundamentally changed something that many were happily using daily. As Robert said, if you can un-thread all our old comments and make a way to delete them all at once it would mimic the old discussions. However, users that like the new comments would be able to use reply or add comment to create new threads so we would have the best of both worlds.

 

By the way, when I get a notification that a comment has been changed or added it now just refers to the row number instead of the discussion title like it used to. I can live with that but it's a little less friendly.

Alex Vorobiev

Again, appreciate your feedback.

 

@Robert - to clarify, what used to be Discussions became threads.  There is a 1:1 mapping between the two. In terms of hierarchical structure, the only change we made was promote the oldest comment in the discussion to be the "parent" comment of the thread.  There was no additional arbitrary or other re-grouping.  For all intents and purposes, the old Discussions were threads with titles - because all the comments within a Discussion were threaded under the Discussion title.  We kept the same threads, but removed the titles (pre-pended them to the oldest comment), and then promoted that oldest comment to be the parent of the thread.

 

I absolutely understand that the promotion of the oldest comment to parent is problematic in those instances where it might not have been meant to be the parent comment.  I am very clear on that, and I apologize for the invonvenience it may have caused.

 

@Jim - I understand your frustration with sorting and collapsing, and we are working on that.  I just want to make sure we are talking about the same things.  With Discussions, there was an option to to delete an entire discussion.  Now that we transitioned from Discussions to threads (Discussion = thread), you can delete an entire thread - see my earlier comment with a screenshot of "Delete thread".  So, you can still do what you used to be able to do - only the names are different.

 

I also checked our previous version - I am unable to find a way to delete all Discussions at once, there was only an option to delete a single Discussion at a time.  I also checked with the rest of the team.  Including a screenshot of the old Discussions below:

 

Alex Vorobiev

Hear you loud and clear, and again my apologies for the disruption and frustration.  My team and I have been focused on this 100% in the last two days.  We are reviewing feedback and looking at options to mitigate the concerns that have been expressed.  Most immediately, we are working on a fix to add context to notificaitons (primary field) and targeting to release that today or tomorrow.  Thank you for your patience.

 

Regarding Jim's comment - there is a way to delete a thread (which is equivalent to a "discussion" in the older layout, see screenshot below.  Is that what you were looking for?

 

Alex Vorobiev

I also wanted to provide an update (also posted elsewhere in the Community):

 

Yesterday we released a hotfix with the following changes:

 

(1) add missing context to notifications about comment activity: add primary field value (up to 100 characters) to the body of the notification
(2) improve readability of comments by no longer hiding blank lines / carriage returns in collapsed comment view
(3) improve readability and searchability of comments (where there are many threads) by increasing the load threshold from 50 to 100 threads at a time

 

We are actively looking into options to address sorting order and collapse / expand concerns.  I will continue to share updates on our progress.

 

Thanks again for your patience.

Rob van Dijk

Alex, thanks for first point 1.

 

Hope to see a solution for the 'wrong' sorting of comments soon..

 

Jim Hook

Alex, I may be confused about the delete all discussions issue. Looking at comments now it appeas that I can delete a comment with all its replies or an individual reply. I still don't see how to delete all the comments and their replies in a row in one operation. Maybe all of my project notes in the past were in a single discussion without me even realizing it so I could delete it in one operation. All I remember doing was going to the text entering box on the discussion and typing in a new note (I don't remember ever clicking on New Discussion.) I've closed over 200 projects in the last three years and each time I would copy the project status row, paste it into an archive area, open click and drag over all the discussions, copy with Cmd-c, paste it into the discussions area in the archived row then go back to the project status row and delete all the project data and then to the discussions and delete them all in one operation. This last step will now take many clicks if there are many unrelated (not replies) comments.

Jim Hook

Alex,

 

I figured out why I was so confused over the old discussions delete feature we've been discussing. I found an old screenshot of the discussions feature and we never had more than one discussion on a project--we never clicked on New Discussion but just typed a new comment in the original discussion even though the new comments were typically unrelated to eachother. In other words, we never considered them a "discussion". So, if the transition from discussions to comments had sorted the most recent at the top and not included "see more" and "view n previous comments", everything would have looked basically the same and we would not have been confused. 

 

 

Alex Vorobiev

Jim - completely understand and appreciate your followup.  We are actively looking at options to address the sorting order and the collapse / expand concerns.  Please stay tuned!  Thanks again for your patience.

Brad Jones

Adding my -1 to the new "comments" feature.  This is a smack against the users and the administrators who have to deal with this.  We took a system that was detailed, orderly, and simple and changed it so that it is less detailed, less orderly, and more complicated.  This is bad!

This is the first downgrade I have seen in our 7month usage of the tool, but it is a serious downgrade and my users are really not happy.  I've been selling this program internally because of the user friendlyness, and now....

Please, put our system back the way it was, or at least offer us the choice between the old and the new.  I'm not sure who in the community asked for this change, but it is clear that a LARGE portion of the community is livid with it.  AAARRRRRGHHHH!

Jim Hook

Every Monday morning we go through a review of about 40 active projects and every week I'm clicking "see more" and "view n previous replies" over and over again trying to find a note with the information we're looking for. It's all on a big screen TV so everyone sees how difficult it is to find something that used to be easy to find. I get annoyed all over again! Is there any word from Smartsheet on if/when we can get some relief from this problem?

Brad Jones

I just called them today, and last week, but as usual they are very tight lipped about their development dates.  This new functionality was rolled out as part of a long term development plan, but it has degraded our use of the comments review process.  I have heard that they are "aware of the problem" and "considering their plan going forward".  Not sure if that means we'll get our functionality back or not.  My worry is that returning to our previous functionality will be treated as a feature request and not as a FIX.

If the comments worked like this when I was reviewing Smartsheet as a product option, I would not have chosen it as a platform for our team work.

Jim Hook

Brad, thanks for calling them on this. I was afraid that the topic was going cold and nothing would happen since there were no new comments on the community for the last few days days. Right now we are getting by by not ever using the "reply" but always using "add comment". As our current projects complete the new project notes will look pretty much like they used to but with the annoying "see more" always there. That will only take a few months to work its way through our system.

 

Allan Ross

So we are contracting with a new provider to design a substitute for the comments section and will be rolling it out to our clients. We will continue, for the time being, to use smartsheets for other functionalities. 

Brad Jones

Jim,

 

I have tried to get my users to always reply to the same thread.  That way the title of the comment always shows up in the notifications.  I considered it your way, of always doing new posts, but the notifications did not turn out how I liked.

 

I really hope that they'll rethink this whole row discussion topic.  We always used one discussion with new posts.  Everything stayed in a nice tidy order.  Most rows don't really need to have multiple discussion for them, because it just gets messy.  Multiple conversations should probably happen on multiple rows, not on one row.

 

Good luck on your end.  I feel your pain.  I just hope that Smartsheet learns from this pain.  I think this may be the most unpopular thing they have done yet.

 

UPDATE 08/23 - After all the hotfixes, we are able to maintain our previous workflow as long as people don't use the reply functions.  We still want to be able to turn off the "See All" condensation that's happening, but at least now our comments are in order and they have the title of the primary column.

 

Thank You Smartsheet for working on this to get it to fit better.  

 

 

All, check out your notifications and conversations.  You should see that it basially works the same as before, albeit a bit less visually clear.

Darwyn Ker

Yes, not a good update - confusing.  Smartsheet - please change this back