[Status: Launched! 🚀] Sort Comments by Newest at the top

It would be much more usefull having the newest comments at the top.  I am not sure why anyone would want to scroll through alll of the old comments to get to the latest.  This should be resolved as soon as possible.

UP! Newest at the top

@Wrike Team

Can we expect any update in this matter ? IF and WHEN  we can expect some activities in this matter

Dears

As Wrike is up and running in my organisation we are also struggeling with that issue.

Comment is an update to a task so as update could be highlighted (on the TOP)

If Wrike has a Philosophy to sort Oldest first and quite a lot of users want to have it different customized option is a best solution.

@Piotr Hi! Our team is planning on reworking the code for the comment stream this year so that we can make updates to its functionality. I can't promise exactly what will be released in conjunction with that, but we bring up this particular request regularly as discussions happen. 

definitely need the sorting capability... very inefficient in a long discussion to see the oldest first

I would still like to hear from someone who prefers it the way it is now.

Since this thread is gaining some popularity and heat again, I decided to jump in as well with an attempt to summarize what has been collected over more than a year.

First I'd like to make the following argument (asking everyone in this thread to correct me if my logic doesn't add up) based on Simon Tobin's (June 15, 2017), Badertscher Hans-Joerg's (June 15, 2017), and Jeremy Tank's (June 15, 2017) inputs:

Collaboration is based on working together, mostly involving a lot of communication.

Assuming that the people involved are interested in a good solution (unfortunately not always the case from my own experience, that's why it's only a hopeful assumption), we can argue that value is added to the conversation over time.

It follows that each additional and thus newest unit added to the conversation (in the Wrike world a new comment) inherits the value from the whole conversation and also brings it's own value, making it the most valuable conversation piece. I understand that there are also new comments that bring minor value to the conversation in terms of problem solving as they only express opinions and don't bring any solutions to the table. Based on my above assumption that the people involved are interested in a good solution, such comments should be very few and the argument about each additional and thus newest unit added to the conversation being the most valuable piece still holds true.

Taking a step backwards, I see the fundamental requirement expressed in various ways by many in this thread as follows:

As I Wrike user, I want to have the newest comment presented to me most prominently when I select a task because it most often is the most valuable piece of information.

If this is the fundamental requirement, I'd suggest that we as a community try to focus the conversation back to solving this one pain point.

Ideally, I'd expect the Wrike Community Team to lead the conversations towards solutions but more on at the end of my comment.

Based on the fundamental requirement, we can now suggest options that solve that problem, and that problem only.

I believe that there are only two solutions to meet the requirement as the comments should only be presented in ascending or descending order (I know random order would strictly speaking be an option too but I think we can agree it'd be silly 😆). The solutions take into account what is implemented now.

1. Ascending (oldest comment first) order: To see the newest comment first, the view has to jump directly to the bottom of the comments.
2. Descending (newest comment first) order: To see the newest comment first, the order has to be reversed while the view stays the same.

I do understand that this is a very simplified perspective considering the duration for which this conversation has been going on, but would argue that we can only tackle all the other requests mentioned in this thread once the fundamental requirement is addressed.

In case the Wrike Community Team doesn't have a bullet list of the additional requests made in this thread, I gave my best to summarize them:

• preference settings by user or admin (Christine Fake, January 11, 2017, Scott Walker April 18, 2017): this would mean that both solutions mentioned above would be implemented leaving it up to the user or admin to choose which one to use. Helen Abbott highlighted on October 04, 2017 that this is already possible for attachments.
• clickless loading of additional comments (Micki Mensio, March 13, 2017): this would probably be best treated in a separate thread as it is independent from this thread from a logical perspective.

Now coming back to the role the Wrike Community Team is playing in this conversation.

I'm not quite sure what role you're exactly playing in all this. We have good comments that include logical details (Anna G, June 15, 2017) and not so good ones that are either thanking us for sharing our ideas (it's nice, but to put it bluntly, doesn't bring us anywhere closer to a solution), clarifying that no one is committing to changing anything, and soothing words about our inputs being taken to the product team, which in my opinion doesn't need to be highlighted, that's a given considering that we're in the Product Feedback section of the help portal.

I would thus like to ask the Wrike Community Team members directly what your role is in all this?

Are you technical analysts, business analysts, requirements engineers (or whatever other name companies choose to use) who do requirements gathering by interacting with users or are you PR, marketing or sales people who just have to make sure that we stay with Wrike as long as possible hoping the never promised change eventually happens?

And last but not least, Ricardo Quiroz, I'm neither good at maths nor did I have the time to calculate any numbers (no wonder when I write such monstrous comments), but to answer your question "How many minutes/hours would I be wasting scrolling down to find the latest comments?", I'd simply say 'too many' 😉.

This would be great for our team!

Hi,

I understand you have a roadmap you want to respect, but that feature has been requested more than a year ago and there are more than 4 pages of comments for it, which clearly shows that people want that.

We are not talking about a major redesign of the application, just a way to sort comments and seriously, implementing such a feature does not take long.

We are switching from Zendesk to Wrike to keep track of non "support related" work and the first thing people asked me was exactly that feature.

You were asking earlier (a year ago...) which software was implemented that way: Zendesk is one of them.

Can this please be prioritised ASAP? I would really like to not have to wait another year for such a simple feature...

On 2/28, Stephanie Westbrook wrote:

Our team is planning on reworking the code for the comment stream this year so that we can make updates to its functionality. I can't promise exactly what will be released in conjunction with that, but we bring up this particular request regularly as discussions happen

Stephanie, what information in that comment did you think would be helpful to any of the customers on this board? If Wrike ran a fire department, what would 911 calls be like? 

We're planning on fighting some fires this year but I can't promise we'll send trucks to your house. We do talk about the fact your house is on fire regularly! Have a nice day!   . 

☹️

Wrike are you listening ?  So many good arguments written over the last month to support this request.  All we want is for Wrike to make our day to day use of Wrike easy.  ☹️

@Wrike,

I believe that it may be in your best interests to provide a definitive response on this subject one way or the other, as it appears that animosity is building in the user community as Wrike is perceived as not caring.

There are many other features mentioned on this portal that have been implemented that are far more complicated, development-intensive, and have significantly fewer user comments and less support.

If this isn't going to be implemented, it's time to show you have the integrity to say so, and deal with the feedback.

Even the email notifications on a task are listed oldest at the top, so I need to scroll down to the bottom of a lengthy chain to get to the task at hand.  As a relatively new user to Wrike, I am extremely surprised at the length of time this has taken to be addressed.  Specifically, I am not aware of the Wrike team committing to either changing this or NOT changing it.  Knowing a position would surely be helpful in saving people the time of leaving comments and checking back in to this particular topic.  This viewing functionality was compared with Social Media platforms, but I'm not aware of a platform that lists comments from oldest to newest.  However, I was born in the 70's ...

Wow! incredible how many comments this thread has and there's still no functionality around this. Quite disappointing. 

On top of what everyone has said and I'm sure this has been mentioned already, what I think would be really useful is to GROUP comments as you do in Slack or even Facebook. When someone replies to a comment that should be grouped in a little bundle rather than replies to older comments being in the middle of nowhere with no context. At the very least you should be able to quote a previous comment so that people know what you're replying to. At the moment it's all quite confusing.

Catalina, this is a great idea and makes so much sense!

Meshelle Loos SYKES

Meshelle Loos SYKES

In my case we work through our active projects at regular review meetings and use the List view by default.

We review previous comments and add new updates, so having the newest comments at the top would be really helpful.

Thanks

@Thread Hi everyone, Alex one of our Senior Product Managers just added a reply to this thread - it's marked as an "official comment" so it's visible on the first page of the thread, immediately under the initial post.

@Stephanie, this is great news, thanks for bringing it to our attention!  😃

Meshelle Loos SYKES

Meshelle Loos SYKES

This is great news, not only in terms of product improvement but also in terms of building a constructive community.

@Alex: Thank you for getting back to us with a clear and concise response. According to your goal, we're all in the same boat with the ultimate goal to make Wrike a 'kick-ass' product. I think your transcription from the user story to the problem statement is spot on.

To everyone else in this thread, I'd encourage you to give some feedback on Alex's problem description. I think it's essential we all agree on the problem statement first before moving on to actual implementation work. Let's collect this feedback during the two weeks the product team is working on their solution research.

Regarding the comment about not being able to implement something fast, I'd like to add that from my perspective, it's all about good solutions and not fast solutions, as they're seldom good. I've experienced too many 'quick fixes' which turned out to break more than what they were supposed to fix and 'low hanging fruits' which quickly revealed themselves as rotten, all because product managers were rated based on the number of changes they've made and not on the objectively assessed improvement of the product. Good work takes time.

@Catalina: I think that is great input regarding the grouping of comments to create better context for side conversations. However, this thread is called 'Sort Comments by Newest at the top' and I'd argue that your idea should be a new thread so we don't create scope creep on this one. After all, we're all project management people so let's try to apply the principles here as well. If you'd like me to, I can write up an initial analysis like I did in this thread to start the new one. Once it's created, people can upvote it seperately to get the product management's attention. Just let me know 😃

Hi @Alexander Plotvinov

It's great to see Team Wrike feedback and I'm positive that it's hugely appreciated by all contributors and viewers.

My one concern in your post though is that you appear to have interpreted the request.  The request isn't to be able to see the latest comment at the top, as this suggests multiple solutions that aren't in the original request. For example, replicating the latest comment at the top but retaining the current configuration would satisfy your interpretation, but not the stated requirement.

To state the requirement in its simplest form would be to consider the current state: Comments sorted in Ascending Date Order.

The actual change request is simply: Comments sorted in Descending Date Order.
The reason this is important is that there can be a differing number of comments [new or not] that need to be reviewed and adding a set number, or even all unread comments at the top, in many many instances won't resolve the underlying issue as comments invariably relate to other comments.

Thanks.

@Gary: Thank you for providing your feedback on Alex's problem description.

I think it is important that we all agree on a certain framework of change management or at least understand what Alex's approach is.

From my understanding, it is critical that users initally express problems and not necessarily solutions (unless it's part of a thorough analysis). Any change request should first be boiled down to the actual problem that it is supposed to resolve before solutions are proposed.

The initial request by Chris carries the title 'Sort Comments by Newest at the top', states the question if we can have the newest comments on projects and tasks be at the top of the list of comments, and explains in a few words what it will allow him to do.

From personal experience, this is not precise enough to work with as it leaves a lot up to interpretation. So I disagree with you that the actual change request is simply 'comments sorted in descending date order'. I'd argue that this is your interpretation of the request, similar to Alex's interpretation that you're concerned about.

My question to you Gary is: Do you agree with the problem statement “inability to quickly grasp the latest status of a task that includes its latest comments”?

Once we agree on the problem statement, we'll be able to rate the solution options Alex's team is working on. Without a generally accepted problem statement, it'll be very hard to come to an agreement on whether the problem is solved with a particular solution option if the problem hasn't been explicitly stated and accepted.

@Alex: Are you planning on discussing the solution options (maybe with mockups) before development starts or is your team finding a solution and then just communicating what they've decided on?

I fully agree with @Gary's comment re. the problem description.

@Patrick, I see your point and appreciate wanting to apply the principles of PM here so that we don't start a whole new scope. In my view, the matter of "conversations" or "comment replies within a comment" is even more pressing as currently the way comments are organised is just messy and I've seen that feedback throughout many of the comments in this thread. I'd love to take you up on your offer of writing an initial analysis and share the link here so we can all upvote it 🙂

I agree with what's been said here about the need for nesting comments under the comment being referenced. It would be great to have this addressed soon because it causes serious confusion and wasted follow up, especially in very active threads with many contributors.

Love the system, btw.

Thanks.

@Patrick Good feedback and your points are clearly very valid.

If I were to be providing an internal solution or a solution under a specific client engagement, I'd agree entirely with you.

Fundamentally, it's about getting the quickest solution that fits whilst having the least discussion, ambiguity, and effort.

There's no reason additional requirements can't be included at a future date, so defining a problem statement and a turning this into a mini-project is overkill and something that is not within the user community's remit, but rather that of Wrike's development team.

Let's not forget that the reason this thread has arisen is that this part of Wrike doesn't conform to standard industry design.  We're trying to fix something, not build something new.

Wrike clearly knows that this is an issue for many users and will no doubt apply the appropriate methodology and design that fits within their roadmap.

The first steps in this must be to have confirmation from Wrike that there's intent to fix this, that a solution is in-hand, and what the implementation timescale is.  @Alex's feedback has provided something towards this, and is hugely welcome, but is as yet still open-ended.

Patrick is taking this thread off the rails.  All the people want is to reverse the order of the comments so that the further you scroll, the further back in time you go. That's all. The problem is identified on page 1. It's not an issue that requires a focus group. When you post a comment it should be the first comment that appears on the page in a linear history of comments. People in this thread don't want the ability to reply to comments, or to nest comments under other comments. In fact that's the opposite of what they want. Go to any live stream video on youtube and watch the chat box on the right hand side if you don't know how it works. 

@Gary: That is very true regarding the internal solution or client-specific solution. I've made the mistake to look at this from my business analyst's perspective, rather than just from a user's perspective. At the end of the day, I'm also just a user like everyone else here.

Since Alex announced that 'Over the course of the next 2 weeks we are going to research how to resolve these challenges and we'll share the outcome of that research and our plan with this group.', I'm going to hold back until we have further news from Wrike's development team. The solution research will hopefully narrow down the discussion and thus address the open-endedness that is currently present in Alex's feedback.

@Catalina: I'll give my best to write an initial analysis as promised, hoping that I won't take anything off the rails as some indicated.

@Joseph: Could you tell me how I'm taking this thread off the rails? With some constructive feedback, I'll try not to do so next time. I've tried to only express my personal opinion, which is always up for debate, just like anyone's opinion. I'm surprised you chose to speak for everyone instead of only expressing your opinion. You argue that 'People in this thread don't want the ability to reply to comments, or to nest comments under other comments. In fact that's the opposite of what they want.' while Catalina and Eric are expressing exactly that need from what I can understand. So either they're not people in this thread or I've misunderstood their comments. As to your Youtube live stream video remark, from what I can see, the newest comment appears at the bottom of the chat box, which would be the opposite of what you said people want ('the further you scroll, the further back in time you go'), unless you mean scrolling up.

Of course I mean scrolling up. You took it off the rails because now it sounds like the wrike team is confused again as to what the people want. Unless wrike explicitly says what they plan to do, I have no idea if they are just going to reverse the order of comments or keep the same order of comments and let you reply to those comments with new comments nested beneath those comments, creating a whole new unnecessary layer of stupidity.

Most people in this thread are probably trying to run a business and manage employees. Some employees are smarter than others and will adapt but you cannot cater to that or count on it. The more convoluted the system becomes, the more information falls through the cracks. Wrike currently has a linear comment system which is great, but backwards. Just turn it around baby. 

It's not your fault though. The thread started going off the rails before it even began when people started using phrases like "Top" (which ironically is in the title of the thread) "scroll up" or "scroll down" because those could mean different things to different people. What they mean by "Top" is "Presented first when I log in" and what they mean by "scroll" is "scroll back in time" no one cares what direction it actually scrolls. There is a chat box that is capable of housing a few recent comments. Those comments are the ones you are greeted with when you open the page. Whether you scroll up or down is irrelevant as long as you are scrolling back in time. That's really all people are asking for.

There were a few ideas in this thread about having the comments log also keep track of how far through the comment history you have read so that if you return after say a vacation or something, when you log in you would be placed in the comments section at the location of the most recent comment you saw before you logged out. This is exactly how discord works and that program is fantastic.

And again, I would still like to hear from anyone who thinks the current comment set up is good and needs no changes.

Add another Org that need to see this feature implemented. I'm not surprised to see how many are in need either. 

Thanks for your necessary consideration to add this feature.

Mike

@Thread Alex has posted another comment, it's now marked as the "Official comment" for this thread, so you'll see it immediately under the first post on the first page.