Hi guys,
I was interested in creating the equivalent functionality of “watcher” that is offered by a lot of PM apps around their tasks and entities. This is a user who is “subscribed” to an entity’s activity - so they are informed when any status changes, fields are adjusted, comments are made, and so forth.
Can I use the “assignment” extension to create this functionality? Or would I need to do this another way if that extension needs to be reserved for only actual assignees?
Thanks guys!
Hey @Oshyan, sorry to be chatting you up so much lately, but I thought you might also have this need, and I noticed of the two “hearts” on this so far, you aren’t one of them! So eager to get your support!
Cheers!
Hi!
We have that Feature in our backlog, hope to be back there while working on Notifications!
Thanks for resurrecting this issue 
Hah, yes, would definitely like this functionality. Glad to hear it is being given some thought. 
Great, thanks for adding. I hope @Polina_Zenevich and team are keeping track closely as really hoping this feature gets prioritized!
Cheers!
Chiming in to say we’d love this.
Further, I’d like to be able to opt into notifications for an entire type or even a whole app. This would be especially useful if combined with granularity: e.g. receive all notifications from comments from this type (or app) would be my number one desire here
I’m a new Fibery user, but this is exactly the functionality that my team has requested. I’ve tried to implement it myself by creating a relation called “subscribers” between our user and bug databases, then adding an automation to notify the subscribers when the bug database changes. It almost works, but unfortunately Fibery forces me to select which fields trigger the notifications and I can’t seem to add rich text fields or comments to the list.
Ironically, I see this functionality is part of the Fibery community, but not part of Fibery itself!
I hope that my vote helps to raise the priority of this request.
Seems like this should be moved to #ideas-features perhaps?
I agree, this is a big part of basic notifications functionality. As the author of this post I’d love to be able to vote on it, thanks @Oshyan for pushing this forward!
Thanks @ASutton for pushing this forward, a big need I still have!
Here is another request that you may be interested in, would you have a look and consider voting?
Would love your support on that one, too! It sounds like your team may have the need!
Just realized I have permissions to move topics between categories. 
So I took care of it and now you can vote (and I also voted). 
Ok great, just voted too! @ASutton care to add yours?
Voted! Thanks for your support and thanks to @Oshyan for moving the topic to the right place!
And thank you @ASutton for pushing this along with your vote!
We are going to start implementation next week, so some more detailed requirements/use cases are very welcome, they will help us to build a better solution.
Would love this very much, I’d like it to:
Easily watch something
Easily see who else is watching
Be able to set watchers via the automations
I could see it working nicely if it worked like assignees:
A hard part seems to be how the notifications are managed, on the surface it seems like it should be set per App, but it doesn’t feel like anything of this kind already exists, so how that fits in is hard / it be more UI noise. Perhaps, the notifications could be tagged in some way so those of this new “Watching” type can be easily reviewed / hidden if required. Someone else suggested that the notifications could become more an an Inbox, which would give a lot of scope of that kind of nice-ness, e.g. view all watcher notifications, view all assignee notifications, view everything
Have a good evening,
I agree with all of what @uniquelau has said, as well as that watchers should tie in closely with Notifications.
One thing that comes to mind is that in most other apps where I’ve seen watching well implemented, you will be notified about comments around something you are watching, or key changes like assignee or state. Such as “Task A has been moved to ‘in progress’”. I guess if you pretty much duplicated what you guys already have done nicely with entity history, and basically added all of that to the notifications of a “watcher,” you could accomplish this.
And, I think this would also show a need for Index comments in search because you might see something in an entity you were watching in the comments, but then forget exactly what it was. But you can’t find it in search right now.
Hope that was useful, thanks!
The “normal” set-up for ticket systems is that they have a creator/reporter, assignee(s), and watchers. Creators and/or reporters automatically get added to watchers. Watchers and assignees get notified about changes, and those notifications should be useful; they should contain who made the changes, and exactly what has changed. This should include the full text of any added comment, and a diff of before/after field values for any changes there. (A nice red/green text diff for rich text would be a bonus, so that if someone checks a checkbox in a description field, you just get that diff.)
If someone updates more than one field on a ticket within a small time period, I would expect the notification system to batch those changes together into a single notification (containing multiple field diffs).
The “VIew activity” pane on an entity has all the information you would need to make the notification system really great for watchers. Essentially I’m looking to subscribe to that with a three minute delay to coalesce adjacent updates together.
“{Name} was updated” really doesn’t cut it for us - notifications are honestly the biggest drawback to using Fibery over other ticketing/planning tools for us and very nearly made us not buy the product.
Love this post, @HereBeBeasties I think you’ve hit it all perfectly! Particularly agree with this comment below:
that creates a lot of lost benefit as the user has to click in to see what actually happened, instead of seeing at a glance the update.
And this is extremely well-said and one of my ongoing pain points, glad to hear some other voices around this. In fact very similar to the conversation we’re having over here
this highlights where I think Fibery is really missing out, and continues to be difficult for my team - the lack of evolved “typical” features you’d see in other more well-known tools, such as notifications, comments, easily configurable activity dashboard, more robust search (showing at least which entities are “done”), mobile friendly versions, etc. I really like this comment in that thread I just quoted from @Oshyan:
How much is Fibery missing out without these features? I have been here since Oct. 2019 and the growth of users seems much slower to me than it should be given how superior Fibery is to so many other tools in so many ways. I recently got into the superlist.com beta ahead of the regular queue, and this involved an interview with a Project Manager there, had never heard of Fibery. I feel like by this point most people in the space should have heard of Fibery, and maybe that would be the case if more of these features were developed and Fibery was indeed less clunky!
Appreciate your support of better notifications!
At the risk of sounding like a biased Fibery cheerleader, I think it’s worth remembering that it can be a little unfair to compare Fibery with the the best available implementation across all possible competitors.
For example, I would say that neither Notion nor Airtable have particularly nice/advanced notifications, but if you compare Fibery with some other tools, then it could clearly become better.
Similarly, if search is important to you, then you would probably prefer Fibery over ClickUp for reasons that Oshyan has well-described, but Fibery does not have the best search capabilities of all tools on the market by a long shot.
I think the typical features or ‘baseline requirements’ for a tool will vary hugely from user to user, and expecting Fibery’s implementation to be the best-in-class for all of them is a little unfair.
Hopefully Fibery is now a little better than ‘mediocre at everything’ 
