I very often miss important comments because start of discussion is hidden. I’d love a setting for my account which disables comment collapsing entirely. It’s worse than useless in its current form.
Alternatively, could you at least make “21 more comments” link much more visible, e.g. with a highly saturated color and a larger button than its current “subtle blue link” design? It seems like if there’s lots of comments on a task, that may be because there is important discussion, so you should emphasize rather than hide that information.
Definitely need the ability to always expand the see more. I’m constantly missing things and then one-by-one, clicking on “see more” to finally find what I’m looking for, quite unnerving not being able to find what I need quickly and without MANY clicks on “see more”
The extension works perfectly for me and is very helpful
However, I actually prefer to expand all comments only when I need to do, so I created a bookmarklet.
When I click the icon in the bookmark bar, “X more comments”, “See more”, and “Show X previous updates” are clicked and all comments are expanded.
It might be more useful to develop a Chrome extension with the same feature, but for now I think this is a good quick way.
// Add a bookmark from any page, click "More..." or "Edit..." and add this:
javascript:(function(){
const expandLink = document.querySelector('.TaskStoryFeed-expandLink');
if (expandLink && expandLink.textContent.match(/\d/)) expandLink.click();
document.querySelectorAll('.TruncatedRichText-expand').forEach(link => link.click());
document.querySelectorAll('.TaskStoryFeed-expandMiniStoriesLink').forEach(link => link.click());
})();
// `match(/\d/)` → We need to check that the expand link is not "Hide earlier comments"
// `expandLink.click();` works immediately so I didn't need to use `setTimeout` for `forEach(link => link.click());`
// EDIT: I added a line to expand "mini stories" with `.TaskStoryFeed-expandMiniStoriesLink`
Thanks for the quick reply, @ShunS, and both options.
I just tried the extension which works fine for subtasks as you mention.
(I was asking about a bookmark just to make it by-request, but the one you kindly included only does the first instance of “Load more subtasks” and I sometimes use many so there’s more than one. Again, the extension handles it so I’m set.)
You’re right, @lpb!
We need to periodically look for and click the “Load more subtasks” link with setInterval. It’s something that continues to run in the background.
My bookmarklet is for one-time action, so I’ll leave it to the Asana Load More extension to take care of watching and expanding subtasks
I want all comments expanded by default, all the time. This should be set in the Windows executable (and all versions of Asana), so folks don’t have to use a Chrome extension to get this functionality.
Doesn’t the existence of Chrome extension clue in the developers that this might be a needed feature?
This issue is NOT solved by the Chrome extensions or bookmarklet described in these comments. On all the other screens (Firefox, Windows Desktop, Mac Desktop, iOS, Android, etc.) those solutions don’t apply. We need to have a feature update from Asana. Can someone from Asana please remove the “Solved” checkmark above, and see that this highly-requested feature is on your roadmap?
@EyeCodeYou, thank you for your contribution. I removed the checkmark. The ask is definitely for built-in functionality as described by @Matthew. Please vote above, if you have not done so already and would like to support this feature request. I voted for it as well.
I would like to proposed the option globally to show all comments and also show the full comment within tasks all the time.
Needing to click “more comments” and “see more” each time you go to a ticket is very repetitive, it’s also easy to “miss” comments you’re scrolling through trying to find, since the “more comments/see more” text link is the same size/style as normal blue links within a task, it looks as if it’s already part of a comment.
One of the best features about Basecamp was seeing everything in a ticket at once. The way I typically use tickets (for web development) is always referencing items in previous comments, or after quickly opening up a task, pressing “CMD + F” to search/find something by the keyword I search… you can’t do this in Asana, because those comments are hidden, you have to open the ticket scroll up or down to “try to find” that more comments link, expand it then scroll up/down/search again. And every time you re-visit that ticket, you have to press “see more” and click “more comments” every time.
In addition to this, for tasks with longer comments/length, having some option to quickly jump to the top or bottom of the ticket. (In basecamp, if you double clicked anywhere within the whitespace of the page on the top 5% or bottom 5% of the page, the page would scroll all the way to the top or the bottom)
Unlike my other request of having an activity feed of all your own work done/comments made, this request seems a lot less development work.
Just show everything in the task at once without having to expand/see more/more comments every time repetitively.
This is extremely annoying opening tickets and needing to literally scroll to find what I’m looking for because you collapse peoples comments in a ticket.
This frankly hostile UI design is a common feature on websites like Facebook, whose value to their customers (advertisers) depends on user engagement as measured in clicks. Getting the user to click to read more comments is a cheap way to measure/demonstrate how interested they are, and make it a more “interactive” experience. The thing is, Asana isn’t Facebook. Its value depends on how useful it is as a tool. If it’s a good tool, it should be reducing the friction between the user and their objective. And unlike Facebook, on Asana the users (not advertisers) are also the customers.
At my company, we use the comment section in our project management tools (which currently include Asana, and in years past included Trello and Redmine) to
clarify task requirements and status,
link to relevant documentation,
update with new developments and insights,
conduct hardware and software reviews,
document reasoning/justification for certain decisions,
and more!
I think it would be fair to say that these are not particularly exotic tasks for an organization using a collaborative project management tool to need to perform. So…does this design decision reduce friction between us and getting them done? No, it does exactly the opposite. It does the opposite extra hard when I click to expand a single truncated comment (“See More”) and then click to unhide the remaining comments (“x more comments”), only to have to click to expand the same comment again because it got re-truncated, and I still have to individually click on every other non-trivial comment to follow the conversation. Zero of those clicks should be necessary; I already deliberately clicked on the task and scrolled down to the comment section.
I accept that there may exist individuals who prefer to have their tools actively working against them, or who never care to read what anyone else (or they themselves) wrote in a business context if the conversation exceeds three tweets. So, I mean, I’d be okay with having a checkbox in the user settings called “enable dystopian UI” that we can choose to uncheck. The ever-optimistic side of me dreams that maybe someday it could even fix some other things…but definitely this first.
