# In References from the same Entity, preserve time of all references **URL:** \ **Category:** Ideas & Features\ **Created:** [June 25, 2021, 3:40am UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722 "2021-06-25T03:40:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![B\_Sp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e8c25b/32.png) [@B\_Sp](https://community.fibery.io/u/B_Sp)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2021, 3:40am UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/1 "2021-06-25T03:40:56Z")
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. Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![B\_Sp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e8c25b/32.png) [@B\_Sp](https://community.fibery.io/u/B_Sp)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2022, 3:52pm UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/2 "2022-03-24T15:52:35Z")
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. Thank you! ![image.jpeg](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/uploads/fibery/original/2X/1/1f5c7a35f19793ddff5c3762e9e6ac0d7b5ffc20.png) ---
**Author:** ![Polina\_Zenevich](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.fibery.io/polina_zenevich/32/480_2.png) [@Polina\_Zenevich](https://community.fibery.io/u/Polina_Zenevich)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2022, 9:42pm UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/3 "2022-03-28T21:42:16Z")
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 ✨ ---
**Author:** ![B\_Sp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e8c25b/32.png) [@B\_Sp](https://community.fibery.io/u/B_Sp)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2022, 2:50pm UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/4 "2022-04-21T14:50:23Z")
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. Thanks again! ---
**Author:** ![B\_Sp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e8c25b/32.png) [@B\_Sp](https://community.fibery.io/u/B_Sp)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2025, 11:41pm UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/5 "2025-01-09T23:41:34Z")
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: ![Zight 2025-01-09 at 6.34.57 PM](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/uploads/fibery/original/2X/c/c14600599129a88f06dc1213fa6de58d5d192007.jpeg) I hope there will be some other need for this out there, and that it’s something that wouldn’t be hard to implement should more requests come in. Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![Polina\_Zenevich](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.fibery.io/polina_zenevich/32/480_2.png) [@Polina\_Zenevich](https://community.fibery.io/u/Polina_Zenevich)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 5:09pm UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/6 "2025-01-10T17:09:57Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![B\_Sp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e8c25b/32.png) [@B\_Sp](https://community.fibery.io/u/B_Sp)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 11:08pm UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/7 "2025-01-10T23:08:19Z")
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: [https://the.fibery.io/@public/User\_Guide/Guide/Highlights-Overview-310](https://the.fibery.io/@public/User_Guide/Guide/Highlights-Overview-310) was hard for me to follow. 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: > [@Ability to quote text across Fibery like in Discourse](https://community.fibery.io/t/ability-to-quote-text-across-fibery-like-in-discourse/3336): > > I keep coming back, at least one time daily, while working in Fibery, to the need to quote text, most often in comments, to use in another part of Fibery. This is most frequently having to do with communicating with my team in Fibery, or creating new content that stems from existing stuff. We have been talking in here in many cases about how nice it would be to simple have the ability to quote like in Discourse, here’s an example of @Oshyan talking about it: Since we don’t expressly have a r… 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: > [@Merge Comments and References in one common Stream for better flow](https://community.fibery.io/t/merge-comments-and-references-in-one-common-stream-for-better-flow/2846): > > Hi, as my team moves along in Fibery, we continue to find References probably the most unique and useful feature. It is amazingly easy to simply type “ctrl” + K, then start typing out the name of any existing entity, or similarly create inline a new entity, while writing in Fibery. The fact that these mentioned entities then pick up the whole context of what’s written in their references area is huge. A big way this can provide flexibility and save time when navigating in Fibery is if you want… - Expanded context so you don’t have to do a “soft return” when writing in a referenced entity, much like the way Roam works: > [@In Highlights, "Roam-like" inclusion of Hierarchy of Text Blocks](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-highlights-roam-like-inclusion-of-hierarchy-of-text-blocks/1135/3): > > Hey, thanks for the response. In essence, yes that is right. Additionally though, the way the link-from-highlight feature displays the related Entity is also not as good, as you have to click the logo of the Entity in question to see it. We do a lot of free flow writing in Fibery in meetings, planning of work, etc. and in fact the ability to quickly bring up any entity with “#”, create entities as well, see the entire entity’s name without it being tru… 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. Thanks and I hope that is useful! ---
**Author:** ![Polina\_Zenevich](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.fibery.io/polina_zenevich/32/480_2.png) [@Polina\_Zenevich](https://community.fibery.io/u/Polina_Zenevich)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 10:23am UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/8 "2025-01-11T10:23:05Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![B\_Sp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e8c25b/32.png) [@B\_Sp](https://community.fibery.io/u/B_Sp)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2025, 4:43am UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/9 "2025-01-14T04:43:34Z")
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. Thanks again! ---
**Author:** ![B\_Sp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e8c25b/32.png) [@B\_Sp](https://community.fibery.io/u/B_Sp)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2025, 4:14pm UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/10 "2025-05-21T16:14:01Z")
I thought I’d mention this again, and curious if others who are using the new “Threads” Experiential feature might also find this now more needed, wondering about you @helloitse (although I wasn’t sure based on your comments in [CHANGELOG: Nov 10 / New Terms (App → Space, Type → Database), New Space Editor, Actions in Headers in Table View, Phone field](https://community.fibery.io/t/changelog-nov-10-new-terms-app-space-type-database-new-space-editor-actions-in-headers-in-table-view-phone-field/2202) that you are actually using Threads yet 🙂 ), and @YvetteLans ,and of course others… Since it appears the approach of Threads is to roll up references to entities that come from the thread as a way to track mentions and updates - I’m referring to the comments here in the guide: ![Zight 2025-05-21 at 12.05.45 PM](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/uploads/fibery/original/2X/1/136c5cda2e3878ad3cf696ce707b2834f5cfcfe9.jpeg) I highlighted in pink the point about the value of the thread in updating the progress of work. I’m also pointing out with the arrows in that screenshot that you can see only the most recent comment’s time is shown. So if you are chatting about something, in particular of bigger scope, like a project, and all the comments are from the same entity, in this case the Thread entity, **you will only see the time of the most recent one**. So you can’t really see when most of the commentary took place, which is needed for the best context. And this also shows how I think it would be useful if you could [see comments and references in a chronological stream for the best information on the history of an entity’s activity](https://community.fibery.io/t/for-activity-stream-ability-to-see-in-chronological-order-references-comments/1300), which is a feature request at that link. If we had this feature, you’d have even more flexibility in where you talk about something in Fibery - so if I want to quickly mention a project while I’m typing in a thread, and I “#” tag it, I know that will show up at the top of the updates for the rest of the team. Without this feature, I have to take a moment, go to the actual comments area of the project, then write my note - if I want to make sure it’s seen at the very top, and the time of what I’m writing is preserved. Thanks for listening! ---
**Author:** ![B\_Sp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e8c25b/32.png) [@B\_Sp](https://community.fibery.io/u/B_Sp)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2025, 4:20pm UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/in-references-from-the-same-entity-preserve-time-of-all-references/1722/11 "2025-05-21T16:20:39Z")
Oh and sorry @Matt_Blais definitely would like to get your take on this! Since I just noticed this post of yours: > [@Don't automatically add threads to the "Threads" section](https://community.fibery.io/t/dont-automatically-add-threads-to-the-threads-section/7972/3): > > Fibery Threads are awesome sunglasses I agree so far, really think threads will help my team a ton!