Small element of Notifications - “I’ve read it” functionality

Hi again,

I’d like to request as part of the Notifications improvement some feature where you could indicate you’ve “read” the message. Something a “thumbs up” or “heart” that would indicate to the writer that the recipient has seen it.

We are trying to use Fibery for mass internal communication (thanks again for the ability to commit with “Ctrl” + “enter” I use it all the time now), and this is another big Quality of Life helper. Without it, your team member has to artificially write “Ok I ready this” AND @mention the write again. It’ so much quicker, and intuitive nowadays the way Texts, Slack, even Email is set up for this way to quickly respond that you read something.

Hoping this will get up into your guys’ Notifications backlog soon, thanks!

Interesting, yes this is generally a nice thing to have. The question is how best to implement it. Should it be a manual thing where you have to click e.g. thumbs up? Or should it be some kind of (optional?) “@mentioned user has seen this” detector and accompanying notification to the mentioner?

Also, what scope do you see these messages coming from that would indicate to the author they had been read? In other words is it just for @mentions?

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Great stuff here, great detail. Real Product Manager thinking in play!

So with this point:

That’s almost like an feature that “watches” to see if something has been read. That would be very cool, too, but I assume a lot of work to build.

To this point:

I do like it if you are able to “heart” ANY comment, and not just if you are @mentioned. This would work well with Watchers as you could get the comment in your Inbox as a Watcher, and then “heart” it, but not necessarily be @mentioned. So the commenter can just write an update generally about the watched entity, that may be of interest to all watchers. Otherwise, they have to artificially @mention each and every watcher - that’s awkward. This I think is a pretty standard way a lot of other apps approach this.

Thanks again!

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Thanks, noted that request as an Idea.
We haven’t researched this possibility and don’t have any certain opinion about it for now.
Anyway will be back to this request when will start working on Notifications improvement - and then will let you know about the decision :slight_smile:

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Hey guys, wanted to bump this up…

As we move along in Fibery, we are really needing some ability for those who get an @mention to be able to simply indicate they read the comment. “heart,” “Like,” anything really.

Without this, the only way to do get this done is to write in your comments something like:

“Hey @teammate, can you come back here and comment back to me with another @mention, so I see it, that you read this?”

…and without the ability to have threads yet in comments, this creates a pretty awkward ongoing list of comments that can get hard to follow. And it’s just a lot of manual work that could easily be avoided if you could just go in and somehow click or leave an emoji to indicate to the author that the comment has been read.

Thanks and hope to get movement on this soon!

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I tend to feel heart/like and other “reactions” may even be a separate consideration, and one I don’t really need. I’m not sure they’re the best way to indicate “read status”. But regardless I agree having an indication whether other team members read your comment would be really nice! The question is how to handle it…

I think the approach some messaging apps take may be good. Here’s an example from Facebook Messenger:

The small avatars in the lower-right indicate who has seen the message. If you hover over each one you can see their name.
facebook-messenger-seen-by-detail

Alternatively (but IMO less good) is the approach taken by WhatsApp and Telegram, with checkmarks on the lower-right of your message showing people have seen it, then you click and it gives you a list of who saw it.
telegram-read-indicator

This avoids everyone having to take an extra action just to show they’ve seen something, which seems cumbersome/burdensome to me.

If a more explicit “reaction” is needed, I tend to feel like that will mostly justify an actual comment in response, e.g. “OK, I’m working on it” or whatever.

I am excited about a lot of the changes coming (and recently released), but most of them do not seem to address the fundamental challenges of collaboration in the app. Not just the mechanics of “simultaneous edits are possible”, but the tools and experience for working together and communicating around our work. This is, as you have pointed out, pretty cumbersome still at present.

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Hey, extremely well-said as is your norm! Thanks for jumping back in here, your additional context will help the community discern what’s intended with the original request.

What you said here:

is the absolute bottom line. I do not have a big preference how that’s handled, and you provided some great examples I agree with the way you’ve ranked them!

And, thanks for adding this point:

I really hope all this stuff gets more attention soon. All the great that Fibery has, my team struggles with exactly this aspect of things, and much of what’s needed doesn’t seem too prioritized now, such as this request, which in just about all other collaboration tools I’ve used is a fundamental.

Thanks again!

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Wanted to bump this up again - seems like a simple thing you guys could add and would aid a ton in being able to use Fibery for real team communications. @rothnic as I know you are interested in onboarding a bigger team, I’d like to get your take. Also @JMaynier as we’ve talked about other tools - just about every one of which has this as a standard feature.

It is really a pain to have to come in and create a new comment to say “yeah I saw that” or something similar.

This is very closely connected to…

…because often you’d like to pick a part of a comment you are responding to.

Really hoping to get movement on this stuff so communicating in Fibery becomes more manageable and intuitive - in line with just about all other platforms online - not just Work Mgmt, but stuff like Twitter, chat apps, Slack, etc.

Thanks!

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My suggestion would be for two separate flags – “Seen” and “Liked”.

“Liked” would be a manual toggle.

“Seen” would be automatically set for an item/user when a user clears it from their Notifications queue.

If by “@”-tagging a user they get a notification, this could work well.

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Any chance you’d be willing to add a vote to this @Matt_Blais ? I am really in need of it - really helps for simplicity of acknowledgement across a team of read comments!

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Just wanted to bump this up again. As I use Fibery daily and months pass by, and I see other new apps come into existing like chat stuff such as band, groupme, even in texting and iMessages’ tapbacks, the ability to quickly respond without logging a full comment is a very valuable tool to know that something you wrote has been seen and read. I know the Fibery team is going to revamp communication in Fibery in a big way at some point, but hoping this very small piece could be added to simply aid a bit missing piece in day-to-day working within Fibery. I don’t see it on the roadmap public board so hoping we might get more support here to get this on there soon…

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This would be pretty helpful. Seen would be amazing. Like would be great. Helps ensure as management that team members have seen documents and entities created and hold them accountable. Additionally, liking ensures they didn’t just see but acknowledge it.

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Great, so good to get the support of a community vet on this one!

We have ongoing issues with this, having to force new developers we onboard into Fibery to “please respond to a comment with a comment of your own that you read the comment” which is very unnatural this day in age when people are used to being able to “heart” or “like” comments, or even text messages for that matter, as an acknowledgement of having read them.

@Oshyan 's comment here:

also illustrates some of the simple fixes we could get to help with trying to manage development and communication inside Fibery.

Thanks again!

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