Launched: Remove comments & page authors for doc copies

[John_Li1]

Since launching publishing on Coda last year, tens of thousands of docs have been published with millions of views. We love seeing all of the amazing ideas and templates our Coda makers share with the world in the Gallery, and have heard from many of you that you love not only being able to publish—but to update your content in published docs.

When drafting and editing content, comments are one of many helpful ways publishers get input on their docs. It’s also helpful to see who authored a doc or page so you know whom to reach out to for additional details. Previously, when users copied a doc they might’ve ported over comments from the doc’s author and collaborators, unless the author went thru the manual process of deleting each comment before publishing. We realized this wasn’t ideal for a few reasons: it’s pretty painstaking to manually remove comments from a well-used doc, and it means you lose the history of collaborative problem-solving.

Starting today, I’m excited to share a few new updates for how doc copies let you keep your conversations going without having those conversations carry over to copies of your doc!

First, for published docs, we’ll remove comments from any copies (while the authors retain the comments in their original version). We’ll also clear out any page author names, so there’s no confusion about points of contact for any teams working with a doc copy.

Additionally, for docs that are not published, copiers can choose whether their copy inherits comments and page authors from the original. Duplicating a doc for a new draft while preserving a previous version? You can port the comments and page authors over. Duplicating a doc to spin up a new project with new collaborators? You can clear out comments and page authors for a fresh start.

Here’s how to use these new settings:

1. Copy a doc via doc options menu found by hovering your cursor over your doc title, or via a button
2. This will reveal the “Copy Document” settings where you can rename your copy and choose a destination
3. In this same menu, toggle the “Copy comments and page authors” to “Off” if you do not want these to carry over to your copy

As a reminder, we’ve also recently launched additional controls that allow you to disable copying a doc entirely if you’d prefer that option. You can learn more here.

We hope these new controls will help publishers and readers make the most out of all your amazing docs!

[Connor_McCormick]

This is great! One thing I’m trying to understand about my Coda docs is how to think about comments.

Are comments a part of my doc? Or are they a tool to talk about my doc?

For example, if I’m building a doc with a friend and one of the pages has a bug, they’ll probably use the comment feature to say, “Hey, this row has a bug.”

But what if I want to leave a comment about the contents of the row itself?

Monday has a really beautiful way of making conversations about the contents of a row feel natural and integrated, like you’re supposed to do it. It would be wonderful if Coda had a building block to enable conversations like that.

Right now, perhaps because I’m used to the interface from Google Docs for commenting, it more feels like I’m editing grammatical errors using comments (a totally natural and important thing to do!) rather than asking, “What’s the status on this project?”

How do the Coda team, and other Coda users think about commenting? Is it something that’s core to your doc workflow (like asing, “What’s the status of this project?”) or is it a tool you use to talk about the structure of a doc, rather than to talk in a doc (E.g. “I think this row has a bug”)?

[Ed_Liveikis]

This is great - another related item on my wishlist is to reset empty table ids. Currently if you empty out a table, it’s row id’s remain at the old max value and it’s nice for templates to start at 0.