We are building our own ‘Comments’ database. Because:
The current notifications in Fibery are not helpful for a user. Since you can’t turn on/off what you want to receive. When we create our own set-up, we have more flexibility.
We want to have one overview with all comments/questions that still needs to be answers. Like the ‘Inbox’ that ClickUp has.
We want to visually see which comments still need an answer and which ones are already answered. That was also possible in ClickUp.
With the normal built-in comment solution of Fibery these last two are (as far as I know) currently not possible.
So we’ve created a comment database + a ‘thread’ database. It’s not really a thread, but you get the point
Sometimes it’s really helpful to have a thread. Especially when the ‘comment description’ contains multiple questions and you want to answer them per question. We can more or less achieve that if we use Fibery’s inline comments.
The problem though is that if you resolve the comment, the whole comment is gone. I was expecting that the comment should go to the resolved tab. But I can’t find the comment anymore after resolving
Questions
Is it a bug or by design that a comment gets deleted after resolving it?
Do you see any improvements in this set-up? I would really love to have a thread with answers but can’t find a nice way to do that. The feed view is very handy so that you don’t need to open every answer. But we can’t have a hierarchical feed view unfortunately
Yes the video that @mdubakov shared looks great. I really hope that we will have a good notification / comments / communication functionality in Fibery in the near future. That’s one of the biggest bummers when you migrate from ClickUp to Fibery. We are building several workarounds to achieve it but it feels really clumsy
We just found out that we will face other problems when we will use a self build comment solution via a separate comments database.
We can’t work with guests anymore since they need member permissions to create a comment (currently they are able to add a comment)
In the future with new permission model, we will often say ‘you will only have access to an entity when you are assigned to the entity’. Problem is that users either have access to all comments (we don’t want that) or only to their own + assigned comments. When there is a thread with multiple people, they probably will miss part of the thread because of permissions.
But the main problem is that we are really hoping for a good native function in Fibery. If Fibery fixes that, I don’t see how we can migrate our clients from our manual solution to Fibery’s native solution. Having both solutions (native + manual comment solution) would be really messy and far from ideal.
So we want to try something else.
Would this temporary set-up will be possible until we have a proper native notification solution
Create a database called ‘Notifications’
When a comment is created in a task, then create an entity in the notification database (I thought @ChrisG mentioned earlier that this could be achieved via a script).
Name = formula → linked task
Task = ‘parent’ of the comment → should be set via script
Created by = user that created the comment → should be set via script
State = default open
Assignee = user that is mentioned in the comment → should be set via script
Then we can create a view with all ‘open comments’. User can open the linked task to answer the comment. The notification view itself will not cover all our specific needs. But at least the user will be able to manually administrate if a comment is answered or not.
It still feels clumsy but the current notification solution is driving us nuts since it cost way to many time and headspace and ruins our productivity.
Since we can’t determine which notifications we do / don’t want and can’t seperate:
Notifications we only want to know (assigned to)
Notifications we actually need to do something with (comments we need to answer)
Notifications we need to look into or only want to know (mentioned)
Notifications from formulas and automations that are broken
Needless to say, but it would be really awesome if we don’t need this workaround for notifications
We didn’t knew that; awesome! That will solve a lot of our problems
I’m flattered because you think I can write this script myself. But after reading both posts and staring at the script, I’m afraid I still need a little help from ChrisGPT if possible
And one extra question: would be great if we can put the URL to the specific entity of the task in the URL field via the automation.
The reason for that is that we in fact don’t only have tasks; we have
Normal tasks
Subtasks
Content items
Dev tasks
etc. where we want the same logic.
So in the database you will see the linked task. But in our view it would be better to only show the URL from the linked entity so that it is a clean view for the user (instead of seeing all databases that can be possibly linked to that notification)
But how can we set the URL of that linked entity via the automation?
Would it be possible to tweak the entity URL in a way so that the systems thinks it’s an ‘internal link’ and therefor opens the entity in split screen/side bar like we currently have with normal notifications? With the normal URL every entity opens in a new tab. When you have a lot of notifications to resolve, it would be awesome if we can somehow show the task in split screen.
Edit: when I check de comment URL in normal notifications, I can see that there is an anchor in the URL.
That anchor will bring you directly to the specific comment.
I don’t think the URL field can be made to open a link in an adjacent panel, but I’ll note that as a feature request.
If you modify the code (for the second automation script) as follows, the URL will be appended with an anchor which will take the user to the comment (or at least to the first paragraph in the comment if there are multiple).
(note: this may not be the paragraph that contains a specific user mention)
const fibery = context.getService('fibery');
function getMentions(text) {
const regex = /(?<=\[\[#\@[a-f0-9-]+\/)[a-f0-9-]+/g;
const found = text.match(regex);
return found;
}
function findAnchor(text) {
const regex = /(?<=^<p data-guid=")[a-f0-9-]+/g
const found = text.match(regex);
return found;
}
for (const entity of args.currentEntities) {
const entityWithSecret = await fibery.getEntityById(entity.type, entity.id, ['Comment secret','URL']);
const content = await fibery.getDocumentContent(entityWithSecret['Comment secret'], 'md');
const matches = getMentions(content);
if (matches) {
for (const match of matches) {
await fibery.addCollectionItem(entity.type, entity.id, 'Mentions', match);
}
}
const contenthtml = await fibery.getDocumentContent(entityWithSecret['Comment secret'], 'html');
const anchor = findAnchor(contenthtml);
await fibery.updateEntity(entity.type, entity.id, { 'URL': entity['URL'] + '/anchor=' + anchor });
}
Comment: as well as adding the anchor functionality, I added a bit of code to prevent errors which would occur if there were no @mentions in the comment.
Certainly seems like not the ideal behaviour(!)
Will look into this.
I checked, it’s a known bug
. So quote a part of a text so that you can simulate a thread 
