I'd like to hear some opinions on this so I've split it out into a
separate thread:
On 02/28/2012 04:37 PM, Joachim Dreimann wrote:
4. There needs to be a mechanism to highlight important comments
I talked with Gary for a long time about how we could allow users to
highlight comments, because once a ticket has 10-20 comments it can
become impractical to read them all. Star voting systems, +1s etc all
have their own problems, and encouraging the description to be updated
regularly with a summary is extra work and rarely done.
The system we came up with would allow users to cite comments on a
paragraph basis. These citations would then automatically be added to
the bottom of the Description as text+markup, so can be edited and
moved simply by editing the description. The mockup both shows a mouse
hovering over a paragraph, which then shows the 'cite' option to the
left of the paragraph, and an indicator of what will be included. In
the description there is an already cited paragraph at the bottom.
Obviously I like the idea as we discussed it but I am also wondering
about potential problems associated with it.
I believe that we were thinking of a fairly simple solution of automated
copying of a comment (or part of a comment) into the description with a
link back to the comment itself. That would mean that we don't need to
store any extra information regarding this operation - a comment would
therefore have no knowledge of its cited status.
I am a little uneasy that this represents duplicated information but I
suppose it might be justified by allowing the editor to be as specific
as required by trimming the quote or deciding to rephrase.
The other annoyance for me is that we would see the act of adding the
citation in the comments as a description edit.
Would it be worth storing the citation information outside of the
description? That would make it a little more like the existing +1 or
star ratings but with the quotations listed beneath the ticket in some
form? That could solve the problem of the unneeded extra comment
creation and should allow us to indicate against a comment that it is
cited if that is seen as helpful.
Cheers,
Gary
