Hello! I’m worried I’m not going to be able to convince my company to use Coda due to how comment appear overwhelming on main views.
Comments appear on the right side as well as a yellow tab on the left side of any row item like a table row or card or what not. I get the idea but this looks insane when every single item has a comment- especially if you are using multiple views of the same table. Often times my team in their projects will leave comments like status updates which works much better than notes because it automatically notes the user and date. We wouldn’t want to resolve these comments because then they would be hidden. Plus, what would I do, tell my team, make a comment then resolve it yourself immediately if you don’t need anyone else on it?
The only option I see is to hide comments at the top right which then removes comments from both the main page and the layout page at which point you can see comments but only if you open the layout view then click “Activities” which seems like a lot of extra steps.
This is the only thing I think I won’t be able to convince my company to get over because it looks so messy. Any insights on this?
2 Likes
For this and many other reasons, we have stopped using the Coda comments feature on our data tables.
They are fine for collaborative editing of pages and text blocks.
But for data tables, they are off-putting. On top of that there is no way of accessing the comments with formulas.
It led us to the realization that the comments are actually part of our data model. They are attributes of our tables and so they should be included in the structure of the table.
So we have adopted the habit of providing a Comment column on those tables where we want users to leave comments. They are then treated as an attribute of the row in question AND we can access the comments using formulas.
The easiest use-case is to have just one Comment column on the table, and each user ‘signs’ their comment with their initials. So you have a single block of text with multiple comments from different users.
When we need to allow many users to leave separate comments (with timestamps etc) we will setup a separate COMMENTS table that records the UserId, the TimeStamp, and the comment.
We then link the COMMENTS table to a relationship column on those tables where we wish users to leave comments.
This gives us way more control over the commenting behaviour and the ability to access and process comments using formulas.
I know this is probably not the solution you are looking for.
But until Coda improves their default commenting UX, its the way we have gone.
Respect
Max
7 Likes
Coda, please fix commenting. The existing system is awkward.
3 Likes
Hi Samantha,
Welcome to the community!!
One of the big benefits of Coda is how adaptable it is. If you don’t like the native comment functionality, build something yourself. Maybe that has been why Coda does not regard the commenting system as a high priority - Who knows?
I follow a system very similar to that of Max for my todo-list with my business users. I had a comments column, but on some long running topics, it got to big.
So I created a button with the code as shown below. I prefix the comment with the day’s date and a dash, you could easily include user() in the concatenate:
The Comments column has a formula that displays the three most recent comments like such:
And the end result looks like this:
There has been no need so far, but it would be very easy to add a Resolved checkbox and use that to exclude comments. I currently only use this in one table, should be similarly easy to expend the db Update Messages table to include messages from multiple table.
As I said, Coda gives you the flexibility to easily adapt just about anything in its environment to work the way you prefer.
You do you!! 
7 Likes
