Yes you have it.  Tasks can accumulate a lot of detail, when they are complete that detail is “pushed back” (hidden) so the staff can naturally focus to the current work (current tasks).  That history is quickly available by clicking on the expand “+” icon.

PS Thanks Rhys.  That’s kind of you to help expand the community and answer-base here.

Any chance of making an option to keep these comments visible as a default?

Well the concept here would is simply not to keep the comments visible i.e. the task is complete, lets focus on the next one.  But there are different cases to consider, we’re always listening.

Totally understand as it relates to the owner and/or users of the account, but my need to keep them visible relates to the clients view. I want to provide my clients with a simple way to log into the blog and see all the notes and comments associated to task I’ve done without them having to try and figure out how to re-open a task. I have only had one client who actually understood how to post a comment and the rest say they couldn’t figure out how to post a comment so having them figure out how to open a closed task is arguably a bit more difficult. Bottom line really is most clients just want something simple they can quickly review and then forget about - if there is a learning curve involved I find they just won’t use the product.

We agree e.g. why we implemented a way not to need a password etc.  Great feedback, perhaps there’s more we can do to make it easier for non-Solve users to work with a “web page” e.g. offering a tip to “Hover your mouse over an activity and click on an icon to change” it perhaps.

Engineering SpecialOps - Jan 04, 2011 06:02pm

We agree e.g. why we implemented a way not to need a password etc.  Great feedback, perhaps there’s more we can do to make it easier for non-Solve users to work with a “web page” e.g. offering a tip to “Hover your mouse over an activity and click on an icon to change” it perhaps.

That would be terrific and again thanks for listening!

We have a similar issue, not directly related to “comments” but when we mark a task completed it compresses the task.  That’s fine for us, but we publish the blog to our clients and they want to see all the detail - so in order to allow our clients to see all of our service notes at all times we have to keep all of our tasks in the unchecked state.  Is there anyway to not compress the task for the published view?

Interesting thought LisaMarieCratty. If clients repeatedly use the published blog I imagine it would not be a big problem… but perhaps for blogs published to one-time-customers, you could simply put comments at the tasklist level rather than the task level so that they are not hidden when completed.

Actually it’s kind of the opposite.  We don’t publish blogs to one time clients, we use the blogs for our repeat clients that use us every month for their tech support.  How we use it is we have a project (or task) and then list the steps we did under the main project/task.  We note how much time was spent on each task and then the client sees exactly what they are being billed for.  So at the end of month they can reconcile what they were billed for with what work was done. 

During the month (before billing is sent out) they use the published blog to see where we stand with the project - what work has been done, etc.  Collapsing the tasks is never a good thing for them. 

We have other clients that prepay quarterly for a certain number of hours - so they want to see where they stand with their hours, how many have been used up and what work has been done throughout the quarter.  They are billed at the end of the quarter for any time worked over the prepaid amount so they need to be able to go back and see the history.

I don’t think you can record time at the tasklist level either, can you?  We would also lose the ability to group projects together and show the steps taken to resolve their issues.

If they are repeat clients and they need to see the task comments perhaps you could simply send them a screenshot once (the first time you publish a blog to them) so that they learn how it works right off the bat. Unlike comments, time records cannot be placed on tasklists but time records are not hidden when tasks are checked either so it shouldn’t be an issue.

Engineering SpecialOps - Jan 04, 2011 05:30pm

Well the concept here would is simply not to keep the comments visible i.e. the task is complete, lets focus on the next one.  But there are different cases to consider, we’re always listening.

It would be great to be able to expand all to see the comments and the details of a task. Use case:

We publish a project blog to our clients for a software installation.
The client, or us, uses the comments to add their notes to the tasks, such as server settings, DNS, IP addresses etc

Once the task is complete we check it off, however sometimes we need to go back and get the information that was in the comment for some other reason, so it makes it challenging to find.

Fair enough Dave. Although doing a search on activities could help narrow the search if you are not sure what blog the comment is in. Thanks for the ideas everyone

Engineering SpecialOps - Apr 20, 2011 01:59pm

Fair enough Dave. Although doing a search on activities could help narrow the search if you are not sure what blog the comment is in. Thanks for the ideas everyone :)

are you hinting at something like search? ;)

we already know the project blog, but have 15 or so section headers complete with files and about 30 tasks and quite a few comments

Engineering SpecialOps - Apr 20, 2011 10:17am

If they are repeat clients and they need to see the task comments perhaps you could simply send them a screenshot once (the first time you publish a blog to them) so that they learn how it works right off the bat. Unlike comments, time records cannot be placed on tasklists but time records are not hidden when tasks are checked either so it shouldn’t be an issue.

Thanks for trying to find a creative work around, but sending them a screen shot negates the power of publishing a live blog post so the client can see things as they happen through the quarter.  One of our selling points is that they can go to this link at anytime and see exactly where they stand with work done and hours billed for.  Hopefully you can find a way to make the collapsing of tasks optional - or perhaps just making them static in the published view.

I agree that in the published blog the default should be to show all comments for completed tasks so that our customers can see all our hard work.

Searching is not as convenient as reading the blog.  When a new team member wants to get a feel for where the project is at most of the good stuff is hidden in the comments.  Too much clicking.