Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes: > On Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 1:02 AM, Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com> wrote: >> I'd like the ability to add a comment which does not get turned into an >> email.
> I really don't ;)
> The reason I really don't like that is that this now makes it impossible to > track the review status by just reading throught he mail thread. You have > to context-switch back and forth between the app and the archives. We had > this problem in the old system every now and then where reviews were > posted entirely in the old system...
Yeah, people did that sometimes and it sucked. At the same time I see Jeff's point: 300-email threads tend to contain a lot of dross. Could we address it by allowing only *very short* annotations? The limiting case would be 1-bit annotations, ie you could star the important messages in a thread; but that might be too restrictive.
Right - to me that's the difference between annotation (per Roberts email earlier, just "tagging" won't be enough, and I think I agree with that - but a limited length ones) and a "comment".
It could be that I'm reading too much into Jeff's suggestion though - maybe that's actually what he is suggesting.
The annotation would then "highlight" the email in the archives with a direct link (haven't figured out exactly how to implement that part yet but I have some ideas and I think it's going to work out well).
Ok, I've pushed an attempt at doing this.
For each mailthread, you can now create annotations. Each annotation is connected to a mail in the thread, and has a free text comment field. The message will then automatically be "highlighted" out of the archives and a direct link to the message include, alongside the text comment.
I *think* this is approximately what people wanted, so let's give it a shot. If you have a chance, please test it out and comment as soon as you can - if I'm completely off track with how it's done, we should back it out and try a different way before we start putting actual valuable data into it, so we don't end up with multiple different ways of doing it in the end...
