Hi guys, I wanted to add another request around Comments:
As I have discussed around here, my team heavily relies on Comments in Fibery. Often in light of the great linking around Fibery, I find myself instinctively trying to link to a comment. So I wanted to request that Comments be surfaced as “referable items” like Docs and Views, alongside Entities.
I’d also like to add that it would be very useful if each Comment had its own visible Public ID. Some tools such as Clubhouse.io have that feature, and it’s useful.
There is already the ability to “copy link” on each comment, and when you do this you can see each comment has an ID. So if this could just be surfaced in the #command as well as unfurl like other entities when copied, you’d accomplish this goal. Hope it’s not too ambitious an ask, would really help supplement the existing excellent linking in Fibery!
Interesting. I don’t have a need for this, but I think I can imagine how it could be useful. What it mainly makes me think of, though, is how one would actually search for individual comments to link to. That would require full content search, at least for Comments, and it could be challenging to find a given comment as - for one reason at least - there are often semi-repetitive things said in comments.
I suppose this could suggest a future benefit to further extending the Search filtering to elements within a given Type. In other words when you search, you can click a Type to filter by that Type, but then perhaps to the right of that you have a list of the “parts” (not just “fields” necessarily) of that type to further filter to. So you could limit the search to only a given Rich Text field for example, or only the Comments field in your situation. Without that it could be workable but would be more challenging to actually find stuff in practice, I think. At a minimum we’d need a clear way to identify which field within a Type each result was coming from IMO.
Note: I have since gained a good deal of experience using Obsidian, which presents a pretty good model for how this kind of “deep” search might work quite functionality. It turns out it’s not nearly as unwieldy as I imagined. Essentially it relies on the fact that linking is hierarchical in this situation, in that the Comment is on part of a Rich Text/Document/Entity somewhere. So you do need to first remember what entity it was to find it, but then it’s not too bad too search for it. I do still have a lot of uncertainty about how usable a full text search within comments would really be unless, again, you remembered some really specific words, or dates, or something, which might well be just as easily facilitated by relying on knowing the Entity to start your search with.
Hello! It’s been a while! My team continues along with Fibery and probably 70% of our content is in comments. This is the most effective way to use Fibery to aid communication asynchronously. The point about having comments searchable that I really hope comes to fruition from this request:
is not that you would need to remember what you wrote, as you are discussing here…
but more what I’d call “typical” searching for a repeating term, or something that was mentioned in comments, since they are the most logical place to put a lot of info.
Some ways comments are essential to our workflow vs. any other rich text fields you could use instead:
you see at a glance who wrote the comment
you see when the comment was written
You can’t get that information by writing the same content in Rich Text fields, which unlike comments, are indexed in search.
If you want to look at an entity that you are using for a task, a meeting, a project, a CRM discussion, feedback, etc., it is essential to be able to have these types of updates around these type of work entities you can create in Fibery. Or, even stuff like a feature of a software system, something you can also track well in Fibery. It’s very typical to use the comments area to write updates to all these types of entities.
So if you can’t see those comments in the search index, you are running at a huge disadvantage with your knowledge management within Fibery, because a good deal of content is left out of the index.
A lot of the more established wiki tools like Confluence have bespoke inclusion of comments in their search. Dev tools like Clubhouse/Shortcut do it. Wrike and ClickUp to it. Etc. etc. However as I stated a while back, Notion DOES NOT do this…yet. They recent revamped their comments, and they have stated in support that they intend to index ALL of notion, including things like images in fields in their pages. So again, really opportunity for Fibery here to get ahead of things.
I guess I will continue to wait and hope for more support for enriched comments, such as giving them unique ID’s, adding threads and the ability to resolve them, showing a list of “sent” @mentions in comments, so you can keep track of when you mention a colleague and whether that colleague actually responded to your comment, etc. etc. It would appear that we don’t have that many teams yet using Fibery the way mine does - as an essential work and project management tool. Because I’d think at least somebody else here in the forum would pick up and support this request. Comments in Fibery are really borderline primitive without improvement right now, and I can’t imagine any team that is coming from an established work management tool isn’t reliant on comments as a cornerstone of whatever tool they choose. And Fibery right now doesn’t offer industry-grade commenting.
Comments in Fibery sucks. We do have plans to re-do them completely, but to be honest most likely this will not happen in the next 3-4 months. Our focus now is:
I agree that the comments function needs improvement, but at the same time I have to point out Notion itself, an example you bring up a lot, has many limitations and “primitive” aspects to its own comments. It may have threading, but lacks indexing for search even after its recent comments overhaul, as you yourself point out. And yet Notion is used by 20 million people, many of which are supposedly working at enterprise level. So hey, I’m with you, but at the same time you’re basically saying that good comments are “table stakes” for an app in this space and while we’d both like that to be true… it isn’t.
From Fibery’s perspective the question they probably have to ask themselves is: “If we totally overhaul comments, are we going to 10x our signups and retention? And if not, what feature(s) can we implement or improve that might?” From that make-or-break business perspective I can’t really blame them for their focus, as Michael highlights above. Those 3 things definitely seem like they must be a higher priority given limited resources.
But at least Michael agrees the comments feature sucks, and will be overhauled at some point.
Michael I appreciate you addressing this with some details of how you see the timeline for some improvements in comments. One thing I’d also like to stress would really help as my team expands in Fibery - indexing of comments in search. I already spoke of this earlier in this thread, but the problem affects us daily. Another way to explain this is that right now, we tend to write in Fibery where it’s natural - if you have a question, post it in comments. If you want to update an entity, as I mentioned earlier, comments are the best place because you can see when and who made the update. It is artificial for us to try to write only in Rich Text boxes just to insure we get that content indexed. We’d like to be able to write in comments when it’s natural, and Rich Text when that’s natural. However, with no indexing, you will lost track of what’s written in comments. I am back here writing this comment in the forum in fact because I can’t find something that I wrote in comments a while back because the few words I remember are not indexed! So I just think this makes the experience in Fibery not as fluid as it could be, and is right now tools like Confluence, Slite, and others that index comments. Those are “writing” apps. On the other hand, I think Fibery should be looked at in this regard to other work management apps, also which index comments, some of which have a sort of “doc” capability like ClickUp, Monday, ZenKit, Teamwork, etc. Fibery bridges both writing and work management apps in a unique way, and I just think that proper comments functionality - including indexing them in search - could really cement that bridge.
Notion does not index comments either, as we are discussing, and that detracts greatly from my experience in there. I can’t be sure, but I would venture to say that they suffer less from this drawback because the way Notion is set up, a lot of users just type away in pages, where they might otherwise use comments. Fibery has a more natural structure where Entities aren’t just “blank canvases,” and you can do a lot more in Fibery to manage data and work, but comments remain a key part of that flow!
you are most likely right in that the target customer for Fibery right now might not be a convert from the likes of Wrike, ClickUp, Jira, Asana, Monday, etc. However, I continue to think that Fibery has a much greater chance to appeal to those users if it has first-rate comments out of the box. Of all the users that don’t stick around too long that was talked about here:
Maybe some of them try comments and immediately get turned off? I know for me when I first got access over 2 yrs ago the state of comments made Fibery seem unfinished and not really worthy of me moving into vs other apps my team was considering. But there was so much other benefit that we stuck around. But it was close. Not sure how many others have specific needs like we did to the point that all the uniqueness of Fibery allows them to overcome the state of comments. Bottom line: I would be happy if comments became “class standard” within 4 months or so as @mdubakov is suggesting, and I’m sure this is going to help retention in big ways!
This is great news! Just to be clear, are you saying that each comment now should be searchable like entities? I am trying to figure out how to do this but I can’t see how to actually find a comment with the “#” to link to…also I continue to have a big need to be able to quote part of a comment elsewhere in Fibery so I wanted to make a suggestion around Ability to quote text across Fibery like in Discourse which I’m doing momentarily…
Ok thanks, I just tried that and what I’m seeing is what looks like a referenced entity. When I click it granted it takes me to the comment in question, but I don’t think the user would know that is actually a comment because it doesn’t look like a comment, it looks like an entity.
What I meant with this request was the ability to actually quote a comment (and ideally for them to have public ID’s). Should I make a separate request for that since you have closed this one?
And coincidentally I was thinking about this feature yesterday and just posted some commentary about how to possibly do it with your current “link to entity” functionality over here:
In fact this is kind of meta, but being able to have comments unfurl like that across Fibery is just what I had in mind and would be hugely helpful to my team. Thanks @mdubakov !
If comments become entities this will be possible. Maybe the team sees an opportunity to use the highlights framework as basis for a new commenting system that is more flexible.
Yes I’d love to see comments have more entity-like characteristics in Fibery! I used to use for software development a tool called Clubhouse, now shortcut.com, and comments had unique ID’s, it was extremely useful…
Thanks I appreciate you acknowledging this. Have you ever looked at tools like Shortcut/Clubhouse and done benchmarking to see the value of when comments get a public ID and can indeed be first class citizens as far as references, being quotable, etc? Hugely helpful…as I mentioned right now the only way I can show somebody on my team a comment I want t hem to respond to is to copy and paste an image of it - which obviously they can’t click to or see context around. You guys have a great opportunity for building another unique, super helpful feature when connecting content within Fibery. I would love to see you expand what you’ve already done here to include the full comment itself.
Thanks again for taking time to give this some attention!
