Support mass edit for comments

Hi Ben! This is an interesting thought, and while mass editing comments isn't on our roadmap, I'm really interested in learning more about your workflow. What kinds of issues get attributed to assets? 

I hope I can explain this well. Our assets get put into a build system. This is for a game. The assets may get rejected for technical reasons (build system rejects it). And in this case, there could be a few assets running into processing problems and would need to be reworked. Those assets will generally each be associated with a task. At times several assets are grouped under one task, for for this example let's just say it is 1:1 asset to task.

In this case, we want to reject the asset and let the artist know what the issue is. If it is the same issue, then we want to broadcast that within the comments for each task (since each task may not have the same assignee).

The other case this is done would be when the assets have passed the build system and have made it into the game. Here the artist or someone else would have to review it. So hence we would broadcast that as well via comments.

As a temp workaround, we are using tags for this. For example, we have a "Review in Build" folder for this and a "Rework" folder. But what it lacks is resolution of details. For example, for assets A and B, the "Review in Build" really would need to be something like "Review in build 175". Whereas perhaps assets C and D is "Review in build 176". So the encoding of "build 175" and "build 176" gets lost. "Review in Build" does not properly identify which build is needed to review.

Now imagine that instead of A and B for one set and C and D for another, it's 20 assets per set. It now becomes more difficult getting across that information. 

Does that make more sense?

Ben, thank you, that helps! This one's tricky, and I'll make sure to update you if I have any breakthrough ideas, but in the meantime, I wanted to say I appreciate the feedback, and something that might help is trying to @mention user groups in the comments section of one task. This could work depending on how your teams are set up, since it draws the attention of a whole group at once. Happy to hear your thoughts on this, as well as learn more from other users who have a similar workflow! 

Ben did a great job describing his particular workflow, but the use case here is even broader than he described. Any time you are changing the status on a task, there's a reasonable chance you will want to add a comment describing the reason for the change, and this is only more true when doing a bulk change.

For instance, consider: you're canceling a slew of tasks because the project or a feature has been canceled. So you select all the tasks, change their status as "canceled", and add a comment stating, e.g., "project canceled due to budget cuts" or "client decided feature {xyz} is not important, and this task only required for feature {xyz}"

Since we've got the ability to make bulk status change, it only makes sense that users similarly be able to apply comments explaining those mass changes.

+1 for bulk commenting

If someone submits a range of briefs that are all missing something, it would save a lot of time to make the same comment on all cases at once.

+1 bulk comments

I would like to see this feature implemented as well.

Hi everyone, thanks a lot for sharing your feedback here! Please make sure to +1 the suggestion above - this is what helps the Product team understand the popularity of the suggested functionality. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Is "apply comment to multiple tasks" still waiting action, or is it a solved problem.

We have a workflow that would greatly benefit from it. If there was a "new comment" field in the table view for instance, so a comment could be written in and then dragged down over other tasks, that would be great and fit in with the other fields that are being set.

Hi Ben Gladwyn, welcome to the Community! May I ask if an automation rule could be of help in this case? You could create a rule to automatically add a comment to all the tasks located folder/project/Space of relevance - you can choose from a large range of triggers to fire this rule.

Please, let us know if you have any questions!

Hello Juan,
Thanks for following up!
I've seen the add comment action within automation, but I can't see how you might build that comment based on values of other fields within the task. Is that possible? 

Hey Ben Gladwyn, I'm jumping in for Juan here 🙂 It's not possible to adjust comment text based on field values at the moment. This is an interesting idea, I'd recommend creating a separate Product Feedback post for it. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

+1 for bulk comments.  In our situation, each of our tasks is a measure that is part of a larger measure group or business outcome. As a team of data analysts, we use Wrike to track the development of each measure as it moves through our process--from determining how a measure will be calculated, to developing a visualization proof of concept for each measure, to user acceptance testing, to implementation.  Groups of measures move through this process at the same time--so when a group of 20 measures moves from one step to the next, it would be lovely if we could add the same comment to each of those 20 measures all at once.  

Hi Joseph Shuffield, thank you for sharing your use case with us. May I ask you what kind of message you'd like to add to your items? We'd need this info to understand if this could be achieved via Automation rules.

Thank you!

In some cases, comments could be automated in this way, but when a specific team member needs to be notified (and that will change for every project), or when the comments needed are specific to a specific project, then I don't think automated comments will be a substitute for bulk-addition of comments.   

Thank you for your reply, Joseph Shuffield, very interesting use case, I have shared it with our Product Team 👍

Any news here regarding a potential implementation?

Hi Renato Angelo, welcome to the Community 👋

We don't have an update at the moment as this enhancement is not currently planned by our team. I'll send your feedback to our team now and if we have any news on this topic in the future, we'll make sure to announce it in the Community. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

We're working with the API now and so have implemented our own custom solution for this feature request. It works as I described above. We have defined a "Quick comment" custom field and we have a webhook that watches for TaskCustomFieldChanged events. If the quick comment field changes then a new comment is added on behalf of the user.

This allows the field to be set once and then pulled down over other tasks in the table view. It also means that in our workflow when a task is returned to the reviewer, they can see their last comment in that field without opening the task and scrolling down to see the comment history which can be helpful.

Using the API like this is really powerful, but to do this you need to be skilled in the art of creating a web service that will listen out for these sort of changes and talk back to Wrike. Bon chance!