The logic is "if they've seen them before".

The logic is "if they've seen them before".

This isn't quite right -- we hide comments from before the viewer's last interaction with the object (approximately), not the last time they viewed it.

That is, if you just look at something, then reload the page, you'll still see all the old comments.

If you make a comment, then reload the page, all the stuff from a bit before your comment will be hidden. The assumption is that you've read and responded to everything earlier than any comment you make, but that just loading a task doesn't count as having read everything.

We could perhaps say "Changes from before your most recent comment are hidden. Show older changes." or something, although that doesn't end up being completely accurate.

oh

I also noticed there isn't a haunt mode for Maniphest, not sure if that's something we want to expand everywhere.

I'm not a big fan of haunt mode and think it's near the top of the "dumbest features" pile, but it's easy to bring everywhere if you're more of a fan. And maybe we're stuck with doing that anyway one Differential folds into EditEngine.

It sort of makes sense to me in Differential because you might possibly be responding to something in the code and might want to look at the code while composing a response, but I'm not sure what the use case is in other applications (especially considering that "Quote" exists)? When would you use it in Maniphest?

Specifically, the rule is that the lesser of:

• the last 100 transactions; or
• all the transactions since your last comment, including the comment itself and any other transactions which are in the same transaction group (which usually means "were authored by you, and happened at around the same time"), unless they are on a page boundary or there are fewer than 3 transactions in the entire history.

...is shown. I think the second rule is a good rule, but is too hard to explain quickly. The new text explains it as:

Changes from before your most recent comment are hidden.

I think that does a better job of teaching the rule.

Specifically, the expectation on this problem in the original report:

Several of my co-workers have to scroll down like crazy in order to view the latest comments every time

...is that they should need to scroll through a maximum of 100 transactions, and only if they haven't left any comments in the last 100 transactions. If you're observing different behavior, that's a bug.

I think scrolling through 100 transactions is pretty reasonable.

We could decrease the page size (or, if there are other factors at work here like these co-workers are also doing this on phones, we could do something like use a page size of 25 on mobile and a page size of 100 on desktop), but I haven't seen other reports of users having difficulty with this.

We could also maybe add a dropdown action to comments (in the "Quote", "Edit Comment", etc., menu) like "Hide Older Changes", which would write some sort of marker for the viewer and lock the fold there. However, this is a lot of work and doesn't seem terribly valuable to me.

I suspect this is mostly rooted in the rule being hard to understand, and that doing a better job of teaching the rule may help users feel like they're more in control.