Anonymous comments on docs

I shared a doc with someone who does not have an account on coda.io. Even though the link permissions seem to be set so that anyone can comment, it seems like you can’t comment if you’re not logged in. Is this correct? I’d like to replace our use of gdocs with coda, but this would make it very very hard.

Hi @Alex_Clemmer - welcome to the Coda community!

I think what they [Coda] mean by this is anyone who is anybody, and by definition, to be anybody you have to be somebody who has identified themselves as a named user. :wink:

But as you point out, Google [docs] does support this behavior however risky it may be and I agree, it’s actually not that risky if you maintain good control over the shared link itself.

Since commenters are free in Coda, perhaps you could entertain the idea of a “commenting account” for your general users to login with. You could publish the account credentials privately and allow them to each use the account to make comments. Shared accounts are simply a bad idea in general and I’m sure someone will admonish me for suggesting this.

Sure, makes sense.

Overall I think I’m not saying that anonymous comments are important, but that the current signup flow, as I understand it, is too onerous for random out-of-org people I’d like to comment on my doc. One way to fix that is to enable anonymous comments, but another might be to simply advertise in the doc that it’s open comments, but you have to sign up. I suspect the second is also too onerous, though.

Yep, it is. And I agree, there are times when you need to completely eliminate feedback friction, otherwise, you won’t get any feedback at all. Plus, there’s the issue of candidness - often we’re reluctant to say exactly what we think, so commenting from named users often result in a confirmation bias, and you really don’t want that, so I totally understand your interest in anonymous feedback.

I like systems that compel people to engage so I played with a possible solution. It’s not ideal, but it might work. Give it a spin and see if this helps.