Showing the time of a reference is a very useful feature. One way this helps is that when you refer to another entity anywhere other than comments, there is no timestamp or indicator of who wrote the Rich Text. However, the reference captures both, which is great.
However, if you have multiple references to one entity from another, only the latest reference will show the time. Could you guys keep the original timestamp in each reference? This really helps context as we appreciate being able to see the difference in time among various references in the same entity to another - it shows what we were thinking at one time and then what changes in some cases, or can show you at a glance how long a given entity is persisting, when it shouldn’t, to give another example.
Hi guys, I wanted to ask about this again as it’s a continuing issue for us as our Fibery instance grows and we reference more and more within our content. I’m providing a screenshot with an example of the issue. Really hoping this can get some traction as it would be very useful to preserve the data of when all references from an “incoming” entity are made. In our case, this is usually in comments, so it’s helpful to see when all the comments that reference the entity are made.
Hi!
We still don’t see many use cases and requests so far, so noted for the future, but no promises. Let’s see, whether more users will share more use cases in this Topic
Hi Polina, thanks for the response. Is this something that would be covered in the upcoming redesign with blocks? It would be useful to sort references, like all other elements of Fibery, so they could be grouped by referring entity Type/DB, so if you have a DB of service providers, and a DB of meetings, you could group all the mentions in meetings of the service provider. We do a lot of hash tagging around Fibery, and sometimes have tens of references to a certain entity. Being able to group them, as well as see the timestamp for each reference, not just the latest, would help us with better organized data in Fibery and faster navigation.
Just wanted to bump this in case there may be some renewed use among newer users since per the recent blog post there are a lot more customers than last time I brought this up over 2 yrs ago :). The need here continues to increase the more age that goes into our Fibery instance. And the more uses we have for Fibery, for example we are now modeling projections in Fibery, leased equipment, etc. When any of that is referenced multiple times over a many-month, or longer, timeframe, it would be very useful to see the actual time of each reference.
Also without a new reference, there is just a very small white margin between the references to the same entity, which are in a light gray background, so it’s hard to see where one reference ends, and the other starts, see below:
We migrated this functionality to Highlights last year. Those are more powerful and structured. Though have some limitations. Unfortunately no chance References will receive any improvements in the relatively near future.
Ok thanks for the update. I have not done anything with Highlights as I have been intimidated by the disclaimer when setting them up and I don’t really understand much of how they work. This article:
You also have the Link-to-Entity feature that I have never used because I haven’t found a good use case. That feature doesn’t give you any context around the link. We find references extremely useful because you can simply write a comment explaining the reference. What would be very useful would be to be able to link to a comment, then explain that, much like you can do here in Discourse. Without that feature, we have to frequently manually paste comments between entities to reference them to readers, which doesn’t have the benefit of including a link back to the originating comment. I made the request for this fuctionality here for the record:
References are without question the top feature for my team of Fibery, not duplicated anywhere else in the market and amazingly simple and easy to understand, and hugely powerful. The only thing I’d really like to see is:
Merge with Comments so you can see at a glance all the activity around and entity, that’s this request:
Expanded context so you don’t have to do a “soft return” when writing in a referenced entity, much like the way Roam works:
I realize that’s an old post but I illustrated in there how this could look simply.
And this request of course (re: timestamps).
I’d be interested to hear more about your guys’ plans for getting highlights into a more readily accessible functionality, like references. Can you point me to an article about that, I might have missed it. But for now Highlights seem way too complex for us to use and we’d never give up the simplicity of references, even if you never improved any aspect of them, for what I understand to be the functionally of highlights.
No plans to improve Highlights as well. Adoption among users is not great, it’s not a popular request right now and we have different areas to focus. Thus, almost 0 chances any improvements are coming in the relatively nearest future, sorry
Ok thank you I appreciate the update. That is interesting that adoption of Highlights hasn’t been great. I did read up more on them after our discussion, and if I understand you guys correctly, Highlights was meant more as a replacement for Link-to-Entity, and not so much for the # tagging you accomplish with references. Initially I thought Highlights were more of a next generation of references.
I remain hugely interested in all the progress on references given they are such a unique feature of Fibery so I hope you’ll manage to evolve them over time.
