[DONE] "Watcher" of an Entity

[HereBeBeasties]

@mdubakov

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.

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.

[B_Sp]

Love this post, @HereBeBeasties I think you’ve hit it all perfectly! Particularly agree with this comment below:

@HereBeBeasties

“{Name} was updated” really doesn’t cut it for us

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

@HereBeBeasties

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.

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:

@Oshyan

By which I mean, Fibery may survey their current users and see “Hmm, only 25% actually use it for Project Management/tasks/etc.” and perhaps conclude it may not be so important to have really polished functionality here, or that the more flexible approach should continue to be the largest focus. After all that is where Fibery currently excels.

But of course there are all the people who are choosing not to adopt Fibery because of the - let’s be honest here - fairly clunky overall experience of doing task management, especially around notifications, and simple task functions like recurrence as highlighted in this topic.

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!

[Chr1sG]

@B_Sp

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.

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’

[B_Sp]

Chris, I think you should know I’m a cheerleader for Fibery and my team has been around here longer than you in fact, we are paying customers and expanding our paid seats right here right now! I do think it is fair to compare you guys with best in class, I feel you should set the bar that high. If you read my content here in the forum, most of it is around the themes that such as notifications and the others that I mentioned that are being discussed here. I don’t know why Fibery can’t have better notifications, that wouldn’t compromise any other of your features and you just had a user @HereBeBeasties saying he almost didn’t join Fibery due to the lack of them.

I would argue that Notion’s notifications are better, you can follow a page which is a key aspect of any notification system and what this thread is about, and as far as search, you guys have some very nice aspects, such as speed, default to most recently viewed, and a few others, but definitely do not agree you’re superior to Clickup, Wrike, Asana, and a bunch of other tools that have all kinds of filters, snippets more built out, Index comments in search, and other stuff. In particular though, you are missing being able to see what is a closed entity which is discussed in multiple places including Seeing “Closed” Entities grayed out in Search Dialog. I would have to say that Fibery’s search needs a lot of work, your prerogative to disagree, I am just one user.

And never thought Fibery was mediocre at everything, you guys have a ton of cutting edge thinking going on here. I just hope soon you will be able to polish out the tool, either via some increased dev resource or whatever would be required for you to get there. I’m pretty sure nobody on the Fibery team would be satisfied with the current state of notifications, search, mobile-friendly platforms, etc. for the next 10 years.

Thanks!

[Chr1sG]

@B_Sp

as far as search, you guys have some very nice aspects, such as speed, default to most recently viewed, and a few others, but definitely do not agree you’re superior to Clickup, Wrike, Asana, and a bunch of other tools that have all kinds of filters, snippets more built out

I think you misunderstood me. I was definitely not saying that Fibery is superior to all other tools for search. Quite the reverse.

My point was that if you pick a product area, say search, Fibery is not as good as the best implementation out there, that is true.
And the same will be true for notifications, the same will be true for whiteboards, and for reports/analytics, and for Gantt charts, and for…

But it is not the same tool that is at the top of each of these lists.
If you want the best whiteboard experience, maybe you pick Miro, but you don’t get the best Gantt chart experience in Miro(!)
If you want the best notifications experience, pick X, but X will not be as good as Y for search.
and so on…

Each potential user will place different weighting on the various features/product areas, and it is true that for some people, a particular area is so vitally important that a sub-optimal experience is a deal-breaker (which was clearly almost the case for @HereBeBeasties )

@HereBeBeasties

notifications are honestly the biggest drawback … and very nearly made us not buy the product.

But for every user that complains that product area X is just not good enough, there are other users for whom X is just about good enough. It’s like the pareto principle in multiple dimensions.

@B_Sp

And never thought Fibery was mediocre at everything

No, that’s a quote from the Fibery website

@B_Sp

I’m pretty sure nobody on the Fibery team would be satisfied with the current state of notifications, search, mobile-friendly platforms, etc. for the next 10 years.

Totally agree, and I have no doubt that improvements will come, but as a counter example, there are many votes for Fibery to get a native implementation of form view and at the moment Fibery has nothing to offer.

When thinking of the 80/20 principle, putting development resources into form view may generate a better return (in terms of number of potential users) than incremental improvements to notifications/search/timeline…

TLDR any user can pick a particular product area and say “Why can’t Fibery do it as well as Acme Co?” but it would be impossible for Fibery to devote enough resources to become the best-in-class in that area without forfeiting opportunities for improvement in other areas.

[Chr1sG]

@Oshyan

You’re absolutely right @Chr1sG that Fibery is better than even some industry-leading tools in certain respects.

I actually didn’t mean that. So sorry if I gave that impression. I actually think Fibery is more of a jack of all trades, master of none.

[Chr1sG]

One final thing, I do not want to give the impression that Fibery just doesn’t care about these things.

Fibery End Game (product company example)

[HereBeBeasties]

@Chr1sG

@HereBeBeasties

notifications are honestly the biggest drawback … and very nearly made us not buy the product.

But for every user that complains that product area X is just not good enough, there are other users for whom X is just about good enough. It’s like the pareto principle in multiple dimensions.

I agree that people have different priorities for functionality, but good notifications are pretty much key to staying on top of things and getting work done, in almost all problem domains.

I guarantee you that no one using Fibery where entities need to be observed by someone other than the actual assignee thinks that notifications are “good enough”.

Watchers would be a huge improvement for hopefully very little work. You’d clone/refactor the assignees functionality, remove a couple of bits from it (it won’t be used for avatars badges on summary links, etc.), call it watchers, and be done.

Not only would it massively improve the user experience, but it seems like a relatively easy task that is unlikely to result in compromises or knock-on difficulties elsewhere in the system. (Of course I may be wrong here - I am not a Fibery dev, just an experienced external dev looking in.)

[Chr1sG]

@HereBeBeasties

I am not a Fibery dev, just an experienced external dev looking in.)

I’m not a dev either, but…

@HereBeBeasties

You’d clone/refactor the assignees functionality, remove a couple of bits from it (it won’t be used for avatars badges on summary links, etc.), call it watchers, and be done.

I do know that Assignees also interplays with permissions (via the Contributor level) so it may not be totally simple.

[Chr1sG]

@Oshyan

I love the team, and I love the product, and I especially love the vision.
…
I dig Fibery, and everything I am saying here is because I love it and I see it getting so much less love from the broader potential market than I think it deserves.

Awww

[Chr1sG]

As usual, @Oshyan you’re feedback is thoughtful, actionable and delivered graciously, thanks.
And thanks also to @B_Sp @HereBeBeasties et al. for providing a view ‘from the trenches’, here and elsewhere.

[uniquelau]

The concept of watchers could be implemented quite easily, if the comments field also appeared in the changed field drop down.

If, we could trigger an automation when a comment is added.

e.g.

entity comment are updated
trigger notification to users in field (e.g. watcher)

[Chr1sG]

New comments can trigger a rule, you just need to use the ‘Entity linked to…’ option and choose the Comments field.
(they behave like a one-to-many relation field in that sense)

[uniquelau]

OK this is good - many thanks, for context:

The comment looks like:

The automation setup looks like:

The message template looks like:

{! Comments:Document Secret !}
<% 
const fibery = context.getService('fibery'); 
const lastComment = Entity.Comments[Entity.Comments.length-1];
%><%= await fibery.getDocumentContent(lastComment['Document Secret'], 'md') %>

[uniquelau]

Following up on this, this solution has worked well and is universally liked by the team.

One small thing I’ve noticed, is that if the comment contains an @, the the comment contains the users (I assume) guid/uuid?

e.g. @laurence Are you able to make the server virtual directory…

[Chr1sG]

Quick update: now that it is possible to trigger automations based on changes to rich text fields, it is possible to create a fairly complete ‘watcher’ functionality.

You can create a to-many relation field linking a database to the User database, and then define an automation that will trigger on any field change, and send a notification to the Users who have been added to this field.
Couple this with the ability to notify when Comments/References are added, and I think it becomes pretty usable.

[Matt_Blais]

@Chr1sG

define an automation that will trigger on any field change …

Couple this with the ability to notify when Comments/References are added

Better than nothing, but still kind of a lot of work to setup and maintain across a large Workspace, given the lack of centralized script management.

If we had a Rules trigger for “When any field is updated” that would go a long way toward making this approach less of a maintenance headache – as would having centralized script management!

[B_Sp]

I agree. It’s good of you @Chr1sG to continue to explain in detail how to get close to this functionality, but for simplicity sake, and for those who don’t have time to dig into automations, I’d simply like to be able to “watch” any entity I choose, by simply being offered an option to “watch” it, just like I can “favorite” them. This is a common feature in a ton of other Fibery competitors. I’m confident you guys will get there, and I hope that’s when you do your mass reset on Notifications that there’s been a lot of discussion around lately…

[anna]

For creating a rule, I would love to have a filter option for “Modified by”.

Use case
As head of a team, I’m responsible for project controlling. I want to be notified if a field (etc.) is updated on an entity where I’m not the assignee. But only if someone else has updated it. If I updated it - I know already

Solution
Filter: Where → Modified by → is not → me.

This would be a great help for anyone trying to stay on top of everything their team is doing (on some stuff…very selectively…otherwise )