Nov 9, 2023 / 🎤 Thread View (experimental), Grid View improvements

[Matt_Blais]

BUGS:

• In a Thread view, when making edits in the right-hand pane, the left-hand pane does not update to show the edits.

• Clicking the gear icon in the upper right brings up Fibery search.
  Now I understand that this allows you to choose (or CHANGE) the comments source for the thread, but this was not clear.
  In fact this seems like a bad idea, because there’s no way to undo and get your previous thread back and I just “lost” a test thread (but I think it was associated with a deleted entity, not sure).
  

• You can create a thread view for an entity whose Type doesn’t have comments enabled - which is pretty useless:
  

  

[Julian_Dumitrascu]

I don’t know why we would use Cycle.app instead of Fibery.

[Chr1sG]

@Julian_Dumitrascu

I don’t know why we would use Cycle.app instead of Fibery.

What are you referring to?

[Illusory]

First, I want to preface by saying I obviously love Fibery and appreciate all the hard work you folks put into this beautiful product. You are all truly superheroes.

Threads Feature: The idea seems very interesting, and I am sure there are a number of ways that it can be applied. That being said, at first attempt to use it, I believe it requires a lot more setup (mentally determining where and how to apply it) then I’d like for simply communicating with my team. Maybe I am over-complicating it. Either way, it leads me back to my initial thoughts of making the feature prominent, rather than just another view.

Opinion: I think more than anything, we’d like to see the current Comments feature continue to be polished and uplifted. Honestly, we’d rather have comments polished and then be able to create a view (similar to feed view) that shows comments from specific spaces, databases, etc. Also, being able to create a comments feed view that shows all most recent comments through all spaces would be even better. This way, I can get visibility to any conversation, anywhere in the app without having to think about where to go first.

Things we want to see that would make us feel more comfortable interacting with Fibery:

Speed

• Typing input has some latency (sometimes not as noticeable, other times it is). Ideally, it would feel like butter when typing
• Improved speed when referencing entities. I know Fibery has to load the entities, but when using “#” command and typing items, the auto-completed references are a bit laggy

Mobile

• Not a fun experience. Makes it challenging for employees that work on the go to keep Fibery up-to-date.
• Auto-complete referencing is almost impossible as the div overflows outside of the viewport and you can’t see what you’re referencing
• Typing input is even worse here and sometimes gets stuck and requires a refresh

Other Feature Suggestions

• Pinned comments. So you can highlight specific data within the comment section, rather than sifting through
• Real-time typing indicators. Being able to see that a team member is typing would be helpful and keep me waiting in (using) Fibery
• Notify Specific Members (Maybe a share button) so that you can see bulk select specific people and give them a nudge on the comment.
• Clear indication as to when you’re notified about comments on a post. Currently, I still haven’t taken the time to test this. When you reply, are you automatically added to “watch” for new replies? Is being mentioned a requirement to ensure a user is notified of a comment for an entity that they also commented on, but are not assigned to the entity? An indication that states whether you are watching the comments. (I know there is a “watch” button hidden in menu button of the entity, but there still seems to be lacking some easy-to-understand UI enhancements).

These topics above lead me back to other posts on the community where I’ve stressed that for user retention, I believe the easiest fix is ensuring data is easy to input, people can talk about that data easily and get notified about said data. The goal here is to get my employees to feel just as happy using Fibery as I am

[Chr1sG]

@Illusory

Clear indication as to when you’re notified about comments on a post. Currently, I still haven’t taken the time to test this. When you reply, are you automatically added to “watch” for new replies? Is being mentioned a requirement to ensure a user is notified of a comment for an entity that they also commented on, but are not assigned to the entity? An indication that states whether you are watching the comments. (I know there is a “watch” button hidden in menu button of the entity, but there still seems to be lacking some easy-to-understand UI enhancements).

A lot of your notification options are configurable (in the workplace settings) including whether you will be set to watch something automatically:

[Illusory]

@Chr1sG

A lot of your notification options are configurable (in the workplace settings) including whether you will be set to watch something automatically:

Great! I think the clarity I’m looking for here:

If Person A creates an entity, and Person B replies to the entity, when Person A replies to Person B’s comment, does Person B get notified if Person A does not specifically mention Person B and Person B is not assigned to the entity?

Is Person B automatically “watching” once they comment on Person A’s entity?

I haven’t had time to confirm this.

[Chr1sG]

@Illusory

If Person A creates an entity, and Person B replies to the entity…

Strictly speaking, a person doesn’t reply to an entity.
A user can add a comment to an entity and/or can reply to an existing comment.

If you create an entity, you are automatically watching it if this box is ticked:

If you comment on an entity, you are automatically watching it if this box is ticked:

So in the case you describe, person A and B may or may not be watching the entity.

And depending on the following checkboxes, they may or may not receive notifications of activity on that entity’s comments:

If you want to draw someone’s attention to a comment, you can mention them, but you have to hope they have ticked this box:

Overall, it’s very hard to predict what another user will experience, since they can have very different settings to what you have

[Chr1sG]

And if you think Fibery is confusing, you should look at the rules used by Slack:

The Slack Notifications Flowchart Explained

[Illusory]

@Chr1sG

Strictly speaking, a person doesn’t reply to an entity.
A user can add a comment to an entity and/or can reply to an existing comment.

If you create an entity, you are automatically watching it if this box is ticked:

If you comment on an entity, you are automatically watching it if this box is ticked:

So in the case you describe, person A and B may or may not be watching the entity.

And depending on the following checkboxes, they may or may not receive notifications of activity on that entity’s comments:

If you want to draw someone’s attention to a comment, you can mention them, but you have to hope they have ticked this box:

Overall, it’s very hard to predict what another user will experience, since they can have very different settings to what you have

Thanks for the feedback! Apologies, I missed that checkbox under Watch Rules. We’ll just have to make sure users of Fibery have this selected!

[Matt_Blais]

Is it possible (or could it be) for an Admin user to:

1. Adjust the Notification settings of other Users

2. Limit how/which Users are allowed to change their Notification settings

[mdubakov]

Not in plans for the next 6 months. And even later I am not sure, notifications should be managed by the receiver.

[Matt_Blais]

Is there (or will there be) an API interface to the Notifications options or other User-specific settings (like Left Menu) ?

It would be useful to be able to configure these options centrally for groups of users.

[Marloes]

Thread feedback

I really love threads. But here are 2 points that can be improved in my opinion.

1. When I process threads on my laptop, they remain on my computer as not processed. These numbers are representing threads I’ve already read on my laptop.
   
   P.s. the numbers are also representing threads I’ve written myself.

2. Threads are also being mentioned in Inbox. Therefore I have to process them twice. Mark them as done in Inbox and actually read them in threads. It would be awesome if we could mark threads as unread, so we can process them later instead of keeping an unprocessed item in our inbox.

Also +1 for what Yvette mentioned above about the total amount of open messages.

Thanks for all your effort Fibery crew!

[Robert_B]

Wow. You guys have outdone yourself.

[PsyRoelofs]

To add my two cents: love the thread feature and if you do pick it up it would be grand to have dynamic filtering on it.

[mdubakov]

What do you mean by filtering?

[PsyRoelofs]

Having played around with it a bit more now, my hope is that this functionality evolves into an upgrade of the Feed. I.e. that the Feed can showcase comments in similar fashion as is now in a Thread.
So essentially we can in Thread-fashion show comments from multiple entities.

I would not need the ability to add in a message (what context would it be attached to?).
Or, on sending a message I could choose what context it would apply to.

My ideal usecase being that I can have a “design discussion” or “tech discussion” channel which automatically showcases the comments/threads from all those entities that I can filter on (E.g.: am involved in, or are open comments/tasks). This way the context of that discussion stays on the relevant task, but I have a single location where I or a team can quickly skim through all relevant discussion.
And it being a first-class thing as its communication and I might need to action on it in a diff timeframe than say actionables from my inbox. And more importantly, I can come back and see chronologically what I did.

This for me would be a game changer.
I cannot understate how much of a game changer it would be.
At the moment it is incredibly tedious & difficult to get a good overview of all discussion happening in various docs & entities.

What I do like from the current implementation:

1. A list at the top of my sidebar that shows me read status on communication apart from my inbox, as communication tends to be higher priority than what lives in my inbox / requires a different timeframe of action.
2. A Slack replacement for simple communication. (which honestly might grow into a proper slack replacement - to solve the issue of centralizing information. (slack doesn’t have rich rendering, etc, etc)

[Illusory]

@PsyRoelofs

that this functionality evolves into an upgrade of the Feed. I.e. that the Feed can showcase comments in similar fashion as is now in a Thread.
So essentially we can in Thread-fashion show comments from multiple entities.

this is a big part of what I was referring to here:

@Illusory

Opinion: I think more than anything, we’d like to see the current Comments feature continue to be polished and uplifted. Honestly, we’d rather have comments polished and then be able to create a view (similar to feed view) that shows comments from specific spaces, databases, etc. Also, being able to create a comments feed view that shows all most recent comments through all spaces would be even better. This way, I can get visibility to any conversation, anywhere in the app without having to think about where to go first.

[jean1]

@Illusory

being able to create a comments feed view that shows all most recent comments

Oh, yes. I’m constantly nagging Notion about this too: updates, notifications, comments, backlinks should all be content that can be filtered using the same table views as any other content.

[Oshyan]

@PsyRoelofs

My ideal usecase being that I can have a “design discussion” or “tech discussion” channel which automatically showcases the comments/threads from all those entities that I can filter on (E.g.: am involved in, or are open comments/tasks). This way the context of that discussion stays on the relevant task, but I have a single location where I or a team can quickly skim through all relevant discussion.
And it being a first-class thing as its communication and I might need to action on it in a diff timeframe than say actionables from my inbox. And more importantly, I can come back and see chronologically what I did.

This sounds more like a “Feed View” for Comments rather than Rich Text, which I agree could be useful as an addition, but not necessarily as a modification of Thread View. What do you think? Are you familiar with what Feed View does? If it supported Comments from multiple DBs, might that address your need reasonably well?