Launched: Comment Subscriptions [FREE]

News from Coda
1

Hi everyone,

We are so excited to announce comment subscriptions - a new feature designed to make it easier to collaborate and have discussions in Coda.

At a high level, subscriptions allow you to follow along with conversations for a given object. Previously you had to participate or be at-mentioned directly inside a comment thread to receive updates to a given comment thread.

This was an incomplete experience for a few reasons.

  • The comment initiator needed to know who to at-mention to ensure a relevant person received comments
  • A content owner didn’t have an easy way to follow discussion for content they created.
  • When you had multiple owners, there wasn’t a great way for a second or third owner to keep track of the conversation.

One of the big challenges we dug into was the idea of default subscriptions. Some Coda docs are “owned” primarily by a single owner. Other docs are built by collections of makers who all want to stay in the loop.

With comment subscriptions, we want to make it easier for the right people to participate in the conversations they care about.

Summary of updates

  1. You can now subscribe to sections, rows, tables, or even the entire doc. (note: you can also unsubscribe to any of those objects).
  2. By default, you are subscribed to comments for new sections, rows, tables and docs that you create.
  3. You can manage your comment subscriptions for the doc in the Notifications Panel.
  4. You can also subscribe users to row comments based on a people column in a table. Like “notify when added”, “subscribe to comments when added” is turned on by default for new people columns.

Subscribe to rows, tables, sections or even the entire doc

You can now subscribe to sections, rows, tables, or even the entire doc. You’ll see a bell icon indicating if you are subscribed to something.

Subscribe to a section

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Subscribe to an individual row

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Subscribe to a table

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Subscribe to a doc

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Default subscriptions for section, row, table and doc creators

By default, we’ll subscribe users to the objects they create. When you create a section, row, table or doc, you’ll automatically be subscribed to any new comments that happen on it. If it’s too many comments, you can always unsubscribe from the object or the notifications panel.

Manage your comment subscriptions for the doc in the Notifications Panel

You can always view all your subscriptions in the notifications panel.

Access it by navigating to Doc Settings > Notifications

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Subscribe people to row comments when they are added to a people column

We know that many times, row owners are represented by a people column. For all new people columns, we’ll automatically subscribe people to row comments when they are added to the row.

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We hope these product updates make it easier to have conversations and collaborate in Coda.

19 Likes
2

Thanks @preeyanka!

This is very useful indeed. Great job!
:+1:

5 Likes
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I second! Exciting that you guys were able to get this feature out @preeyanka! Another big one for teams using Coda for project management. Very well thought-out, as usual with you guys…

3 Likes
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It would be nice if there were a way to subscribe to comments via a button (should be easy for you to implement) or formula (likely harder for you to implement, but ideal for my use case).

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Hi Matthew! I am part of Coda’s Success Team and excited to see you looking through some past Community posts.

Can you share a little bit more about your use case for us as we think about this as a request for the future? Where would the button or formula be shown? Why a formula over a button for your needs?

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Guys (and girls) after the 3 or 4 newest updates that have been released. I can’t help but think - that even half of this energy could have been used to make a functional Gantt chart…

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Hi @Maggie_Barnes,

Thanks for responding! I have built a project dashboard for a non-profit organization in Coda. It lists a bunch of projects, and lets people click on the ones they want to volunteer for. It also lets us list volunteers that aren’t using Coda, by using Volunteer records that contain Coda users as a layer of indirection. Projects have a “Volunteers” multiple-select of Volunteer records. When a volunteer is subscribed to a project, we want them to get comment notifications. There are two ways I can see this being accomplished:

  • (ideal) have comment subscriptions be based on a column formula that returns Coda users
  • (workaround) allow a user to subscribe/unsubscribe to comments by clicking a button

I can show you a demo of my dashboard if you’re curious. Also, I should note that I simplified a few things about my doc for the purposes of providing a clearer example. Underneath the hood, I’m doing something a bit more complicated.

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Hi Matthew! I would love to take a look at your tracker and see what the best ways forward might be for volunteers to have easier access to comment subscriptions.

Could you use this link to choose a time that works for you to set up a call?