Projects with members who have comment only access - especially clients (guests within Asana).
For productivity, working on a project with some tasks internally. The team provides comments on tasks and some work has progressed.
Client (or asana guest) has been given access to the project to share transparency on progress. Their access is comment only.
What I would love is:
All comments by project team members within organisation to have the ability to be locked (hidden) from guests.
This way, if the team was discussing something about the work that should stay internal, guests with comment only access wont see these comments as we can lock them.
I do have a workaround it, I just think it would be cool to click a comment and select (lock for internal view only).
If you are not familiar with comments only projects, you can check the set up here
What do people think of such additional access control?
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This sounds like a nightmare to set up (click on every single comment and hide?) as well as a major risk if you forget one comment…
But I do agree on the fact that it is not easy to have private discussions in a public board…
Yes, you are right. This would be cumbersome.
So the setting should be at a project level and the image above could be used as a secondary approach after project access has been determined 
But then if you do this you won’t have a way to talk to the client directly, unless you have something considering they only see what you say if you mention them 
It does not need to be either or. That is the point of this product feedback 
. When setting up a project, you have a more enhanced set up for comments where you can determine if internal comments are visible to guests or not. And if you apply a universal rule, then the … in the comment setting like the image I shared will allow you to override that.
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Hey Rashad, id love to know your workaround on this to understand if its something I should start applying myself.
We have recently started using our campaign projects with our clients granted guest access (comment only) so they can easily view project progress, status and all the detail within. The “live” snapshot of activity is proving excellent and has dramatically cut down internal time spent drafting regular reports. (Which is basically wasted time copy and pasting detail from Asana out onto emails…)
Internally we do however communicate frequently and effectively on individual tasks within the comments between team members to share info, question activity and often challenge opinions with language and detail we do not want the client (guest user) to see.
Id love the ability to be able to have both internal and external comment ability that is task specific and not via chat.
Thanks!
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Hello @nb_nbhd
Welcome to the community!
The two workarounds I have require clear guidelines and monitoring, but they work. So it depends on the level of (and quantity) of tasks you have internal engagement on.
One way:
I drove the internal conversation using Microsoft Teams - because it is our internal messaging app. Asana integrates well with Teams, so I drive the internal comms on teams, and kept the task comments for client engagement only.
Another way:
Have a private project related to the client facing one and have prep tasks in the private project where the team can easily comment - this private project is not visible to the client.
I am a fan of the first approach, because the second one can sometimes be counter intuitive in terms of productivity and requires good focus to ensure the original set up (private project and client project) are closely linked.
I hope this helps a bit.
Thanks @Rashad_Issa, super helpful - I was already doing option 2 - which actually led me to where I am now and having the confidence that giving client access to one singular project will cut down on additional admin and reporting, obviously while this solves a lot of productivity issues it now creates the problem we have here.
Having two projects does feel clunky and im going to try and avoid it moving fwd.
Will explore how to separate internal comms.
Thanks !
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@Rashad_Issa’s suggestion to have more robust comment controls at the project level would be incredibly useful. Currently, our organization uses Asana to manage our client project work plans. We would like to give our clients guest access to our project boards so that they can view a high-level overview of the project work plan and the progress achieved. However, since we use the Asana comments feature pretty heavily internally to communicate about project updates and to share key project documents, we would love the ability to adjust comment permissions and access. Having this feature could be a game-changer for us!
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… years later we still stuck in most simple project basics and communication needs: Hide information from specific user or user group/teams.
And its nothing special for asana to talk in “workarounds”, because also this function is not integrated out of the box. And we dont have the power anymore to talk years later about basics. So we cancled all 60 asana accounts and migrated +900 boards to another solution. Since that day i ask myself: why i chosed the way with pain, at the same time i can have clean solution that fits and not only workarounds… Please asana, stop doing great marketing… you reall need to improve your product faster in the base before adding more and more functions which are not completed…
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