No way to easily view all unresolved conversations

[gpuma]

Am I missing something? in the files changed view you only get a tiny dropdown of the conversations and clicking them doesn't even seem to work when the file is marked as viewed.

In the conversation view, I need to keep scrolling and clicking load more. Thus, I can't even do a text search with my browser without "opening" all the hidden threads (and this also excludes solved conversations)

[alecgibson]

On top of this, it would be nice to also see resolved conversations (sometimes it's good to check that the PR author hasn't just resolved a comment without actually addressing the issue).

I kind of feel like the little "Conversations" popover should be a full-blown view of its own.

[tonglil]

It would be great if there could be a dis-aggregated tab for just conversations.

ie convert the current conversation tab into timeline as is (keeps everything), and then create a conversation tab that only shows comments and reviews' comments (no labels, references from other issues, bases changing, force pushing, PR name changing, etc).

This way when PRs get into the 50+ commits and there's more than a handful of comments and reviews, you don't need to collapse and hide things because commits dominate the page length.

When everything is together, it becomes way to overwhelming to look through, particularly when there is a comment you want to refer to (ie test/coverage info, etc).

To

In the conversation tab, there should be a button to toggle all resolved comments between show and hide

---

Separately, please let us reply to "standalone" comments in a PR.

[devmi]

I just moved from Bitbucket and really miss their PR Tasks panel, a beloved 9-years-old feature:

[devmi]

Here is what I loved about that feature on BB and I think Github users will ❤️ it too:

• 1. It provides a summary view of the tasks
• 2. It tells me also a summary of their progress status
• 3. it always stays visible on a side panel (although I can collapse it when I want to)
• 4. I can mark tasks as resolved (or unresolved), I can edit tasks, I can delete them
• 5. If the task was added through the code, it adds a navigational link to the comment in the code
• 6. If I scroll through the code, the task view is still there
• 7. Comments that don't require a task don't block the PR to be merged
• 8. If I add a comment and want to "convert" it (or part of it) to a task, I can select the text and click on Add task
• 9. Unresolved tasks don't disappear, unless a person deletes it

[m4sterbunny]

I have a PR with over 400 conversations. I am only interested in the unresolved items. The experience is slow (chrome offering the wait or kill page) also, when I expand my 180 items to find the golden 5 items that are unresolved there is a random experience that all the resolved items expand out. I can not tell you what triggers this.
Why do I not have a simple filter to view all unresolved conversations?

[m4sterbunny]

This beta looks like a solution -- how do I get it?! https://github.blog/changelog/2021-05-25-new-tools-to-discover-and-resolve-pull-request-conversations-beta/

[diegoconcha]

My team and I have the same issue with a lot of our PRs. We generally have lots of unresolved conversations hidden by the UI which we have dig for. This shouldn't be that difficult and github could improve the UX here significantly.

[AdamEr8]

This beta looks like a solution -- how do I get it?! https://github.blog/changelog/2021-05-25-new-tools-to-discover-and-resolve-pull-request-conversations-beta/

This seems to be generally available already:
https://github.blog/changelog/2021-06-16-new-tools-to-discover-and-resolve-pull-request-conversations-now-generally-available/

[circlesmiler]

Some more thoughts on this:
It also would be nice to have the possibility to simple "jump" to the next unresolved conversation. Not sure, if the current file view is performing good enough to handle this.

Maybe it could be a solution to put the conversations into a separate view? Maybe there could be a link from a conversation to the file (only the file, not the whole file view)?

[chris-activewrite]

GitLab does this well

[zyxist]

The current way of navigating through unresolved conversations is counter-intuitive. Only a couple minutes ago I had to break out from a 3-day training, because it turned out that GitHub hid several random conversations in an important PR and I missed them. Please avoid making UI that hides important stuff from the view. A good and deterministic summary of all changes I need to make or comment is a must - this is why I'm opening the pull request view in Github, when I'm about to fix something.

[billytetrud]

Yes, this is incredibly annoying and often harmful. Please don't hide relevant comments. Anything with new comments should not be hidden. Resolved conversations are already hidden. Hide old comments in thread if you want, but not new ones.

[AdamEr8]

Here's a short JS snippet I use (with the extension Custom Javascript for Websites to work around this:

function findAllLoadMoreBtns() {
    return document.querySelectorAll('button[class*="ajax-pagination-btn"]')
}

function clickAllLoadMoreBtns() {
    var allBtns = findAllLoadMoreBtns()
    allBtns.forEach(function (e) { e.click() })
    return allBtns.length
}

function hideAllElems(elemArr) {
    elemArr.forEach(function (e) { e.style.display = "none" })
}

function findAllResolvedComments() {
    return document.querySelectorAll('details[data-resolved=true]')
}

function hideAllResolvedComments() {
    hideAllElems(findAllResolvedComments())
}

function findAllCommitGroups() {
    return [...document.querySelectorAll('div[data-test-selector="pr-timeline-commits-list"]')].map(d => d.parentNode)
}

function hideAllCommitGroups() {
    hideAllElems(findAllCommitGroups())
}

function clear() {
    button = document.getElementById('clear_btn')
    button.classList.add('disabled')
    button.innerHTML = "Clearing............"
    if (clickAllLoadMoreBtns() > 0) {
        setTimeout(clear, 100)
    } else {
        hideAllResolvedComments()
        hideAllCommitGroups()
        button.innerHTML = "Cleared"
    }
}

function bOnPullRequestConversation() {
    onPR = window.location.pathname.split('/')[3] == "pull"
    onConvTab = document.querySelector('a.tabnav-tab.selected').text.includes('Conversation')
    return onPR && onConvTab
}

function addClearButton() {
    var button = document.createElement('button')
    button.id = "clear_btn"
    button.innerHTML = "Show only unresolved comments"
    button.onclick = clear
    button.className = 'btn btn-sm btn-outline'
    button.style.marginBottom = '10px'

    discussDiv = document.getElementById('discussion_bucket')
    discussDiv.insertBefore(button, discussDiv.firstChild)
}

if (bOnPullRequestConversation()) {
    addClearButton()
}

[AdamEr8]

OK nvm, this seems to not be necessary anymore: https://github.blog/changelog/2021-06-16-new-tools-to-discover-and-resolve-pull-request-conversations-now-generally-available/

[enBonnet]

It is working terrible, sadly, if you choose a conversation it will display that conversation for a moment, then it will move away to anywhere.
Tested on Firefox and Chrome.

[robinstewart]

Yes this is frustrating, it jumps to the conversation and then a second later jumps away. And some conversations seem to be completely gone — maybe later edits to the branch removed the code they were attached to? How can I mark a comment as resolved if I can't actually get to the comment to resolve it?

[changchiyou]

@AdamEr8 I refer to your code and rewrite it: https://github.com/changchiyou/Github-PR-View-Unresolved-Conversations 😉

[soroshsabz]

Any updated? or plan to resolve this issue?

[bernardofm]

I'm looking for this feature too and found this discussion. It's very annoying search manually for the opened review comments. Some times a PR is approved and however we leave some itens that were acceptable to see later. I think a filter can be good enough.

[KrzysztofMadejski]

Also after a rebase or changing file some unresolved discussions becomes "Outdated", which does not mean resolved. When I click on them via new Conversations popup I'm getting "We went looking everywhere, but couldn’t find those commits." and I can't see them.

[weitzhandler]

This is the most frustrating issue in GH issues and PRs.

[pbodnar]

100% agreed, making even a medium-sized code reviews on GH is incredibly frustrating. I don't say the main competitor here GitLab is perfect, yet working with comments threads is so much more intuitive (and productive!) there, IMO. Add to this you can't even start a top level thread (#8469) or that you can't always easily post new comments / replies to the PR in batch (i.e. why is the option to start a review, then add some comments and then send them not available everywhere?).

Instead of doing something with these problems, it looks like GitHub rather focuses on things like #52083 which apparently adds little to zero value to the UX (e.g., it looks like one still cannot get to pages available just from the Code project tab, like Releases, easily?). Very disappointing...

[soroshsabz]

I think Azure DevOps has very better UX for reviewing

[odahcam]

Somehow the PR review experience managed to get worse over the years. I cannot understand why comments are hidden under a dropdown after a new commit is added. What is the value of a comment tool if it will be hidden every time a commit is added? It would be more valuable if I took a screenshot and send it in a chat instead, at least I could use it as a reference for reviewing the new commits later. GitHub PR experience used to be the best.

[dolfandringa]

I totally agree. Code review is just plain painful. I loved using github on the FOSS projects I was occasionally contributing to, but now that I use it for a new job, it is terrible. I always disliked Atlassians lack of features and speed of development, but they definitely do the bitbucket UI way better then github.

[Olshansk]

+1 to this. If the post reaches a few hundred upvotes, I'd be comfortable bringing it with some of my personal contacts at GitHub.

[lcswillems]

It is at 150 upvotes. Could you please forward it internally? 🙏

[tam-nguyen-yum]

+1, this issue is extremely frustrating and costing a lot of time from developers

[birosrichard]

+1 the experience is so bad this way when you have multiple unresolved comments

[changchiyou]

Hey everyone! I made a Tampermonkey Plugin to quickly view unsolved conversations: Github-PR-View-Unresolved-Conversations

demo.mov

[odahcam]

It is nice but I want to have those conversations displayed within the current code, it is a pain to have multiple tabs open just to see the old code and comment at one tab and the new code in another tab.

[AnnaMadsenKnowit]

Just adding this to the list of very inconvenient UX from GitHub's side (the others being about "pending" and "outdated" comments)

It's just crazy how comments and feedback, which is The One most important thing with pull requests, just sort of disappears in the rest of all the info and is heavily de-prioritized. Sometimes I feel like GitHub loves to hide comments away when you need them, and then suddenly starts to behave like an archaeologist, digging up comments from two months ago you've never seen.

[benny-yamagata]

Coming from Azure DevOps, their PR system was absolutely delightful:

1. Dedicated views to show only My Comments, All Comments, Unresolved Comments, etc.
2. Comments are shown on the files themselves as I am scrolling through them, and can be collapsed if necessary to make the code more readable.
3. Can make and reply to standalone PR comments

Please fix these issues on your PR system. Thanks!

[fuglede]

+1 on this one. Even with all the confusing stuff going on in other parts of Visual Studio Online Visual Studio Team Services Azure DevOps, they did manage to nail a highly efficient pull request workflow. Here's to hoping that this gets adopted on GitHub as well, as Microsoft are bringing the two services closer and closer to parity.

[michaelteter]

I struggle with this problem all the time. I swear I uncollapse every comment, and they all appear to be resolved. It happens on multiple PRs for me, regularly. Eventually I give up, add a general comment apologizing and noting that I'm dismissing the outstanding requested change.

Something is clearly wrong with the UI or the stats on the backend of Github.