PR comment threading + reviews

[pohly]

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Comment threading for GitHub pull requests is unintuitive and often leads to fragmented discussions. Comments are shown out of context and other developers cannot reply, so they quote the comment in a new comment for the PR and the entire threading of comments breaks apart. This fragments the discussion and makes it hard to keep focused.

I have some specific suggestions:

• When someone has started a review and then adds a comment as reply to some existing comment, that new comment should not become part of their review. People do that as they go through a diff top-to-bottom and encounter comments left by others. Their comments then get shown both in the original thread and in their review, which is the problem described above (out of context, cannot reply directly). They could just not do reviews, but that has drawbacks, too, and would mean that people need to change their behavior. Fixing it on the GitHub side would be easier.

  Alternatively, the comments on threads could be hidden in the review, with the option to unfold if someone really wants to know.

  Related to this is that you can reply to a comment in a review if it is the last one of the thread. People do that, perhaps not even realizing that they are responding to a larger thread and then miss that context when writing their reply. You can't reply if someone else already replied, with no visible clue about this. Highly confusing and I know of people who use GitHub a lot and haven't figured this out...

• It should be possible to reply to a review summary or general PR comment, with threading. When adding a comment at the bottom after several other people have written something, it isn't clear what the comment refers to unless people are careful with manual quoting.

• A comment thread that has recently been commented on should not be hidden under "Hidden items".

Example:

• cannot reply to comment in review
• can reply to same comment in thread

[github-actions[bot]]

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[thockin]

Related: "outdated comments" is an anti-feature. The only comments that should ever be hidden are ones that have explicitly been resolved. Preferably resolved and acknowledged by the reporter.

It is far too easy to "lose" comment threads. When the pr author changes something unrelated to that thread. For example, spelling. In a PR with lots of comments, it becomes intractable for the reviewer to chase down every outdated comment, because they do not show in the files view.

I would much rather see a comment attached to a nearby line of code, Even if it isn't the same as the original, even if it seems random, than to lose the comment entirely.