Upstreaming from https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T912
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This makes in-browser find difficult and requires me to click a link in order to see the full task. We should either make this comment hiding/collapsing configurable per-user or simply disable it across the site. Hiding/collapsing comments directly hinders and harms user-to-user communication and results in wasted time as people make duplicative comments.
@qgil seems to have pointed out the rule on that ticket, but we only collapse after (technically, right before) your most recent action, not by default. The theory is that if you've acted on an object you usually have already read everything above your action, and you can review your most recent action for a reminder of where things left off.
In practice, this seems to be a widely reasonable heuristic and all or nearly-all feedback we've received about this feature has been positive, I think.
It's possible that we might want to disable this rule for specific types of actions (for example, maybe just a CC or just a mention or something shouldn't trigger the collapse), but it looks like the use case in the attached ticket was a comment.
For the overwhelming majority of users, auto-collapsing before the user's most recent comment seems to be a desirable feature, so we don't plan to remove this or make it optional.
(After T4712, we will collapse by default for very large transaction sets, but the minimum cutoff will probably be something like 100 or 200 items.)
Hello, here is my use case.
After I've created a task, often for myself, I use its comments as a kind of log for everything I do with the task. I explain (often to myself 😄) which SQL queries I executed, what ideas turned out to be bad ideas and so on. I try to write everything that won't end up in VCS but should be remembered just in case. It's like a pastebin, and it's very useful. And while I continue working on the issue, I sometimes need to quickly find what I wrote before. For example, to copy-paste the same SQL query. Even after I have finished the task, if I want to find something related to the task, I want to open the page and immediately see the text that I was looking for.
So, I believe the collapsing thing should really be a per-user or per-instance configurable feature because it is really annoying for people like me.
I disagree. This option is a lot like email notification options which are already present in Phabricator. It expresses very personal preferences of how user prefers to read the same content. And for me it is more important than ability to set board backgrounds.
Then please fork Phabricator to provide this option on your local install. One interested party every few years isn't enough interest for us to add an option, and it's probably 1-2 lines of code for you to provide it for yourself.