New comment box powers in collaborative Deploy Previews

We’ve enhanced the comment box textarea inside the drawer of all collaborative Deploy Previews to include a toolbar of common text formatting options. This should make writing well-formatted pull request comments easier for the Reviewers on your team who may not be familiar with Markdown.

Additionally, we’ve added keyboard shortcuts that users have become accustomed to when leaving rich comments on the web, like ⌘B / ctrl-B for adding bold text, and ⌘K / ctrl-K for inserting a link.

If you’re writing a bulleted list, pressing the return key will continue adding bulleted items. If you’re writing a numbered list, pressing the return key will auto-increment the item on the next line.

You can also drag & drop image and video files directly onto the textarea to upload and display them in Markdown format. While we support native screen capture and screen recording via buttons in the drawer’s UI, drag & drop is an easy way to upload the files that you already have.

We hope you enjoy this new functionality! Let us know what you think!

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Hello @jasonb

We recently started to use Netlify with DeployPreviews and Review Toolbar feature.
On thing that is very frustrating that in GitHub PRs the comments left are written by Netlify bot, and it’s not visible who actually wrote the comment inside the PR (so have to explicitly go to deploy instance and open the commenting there, which is time consuming sometimes)

Is there a way to display the reviewer name in the PR itself? + maybe would be good to have a replay functionality to the comment within GitHub

Hi @modularcoder! Thanks for reaching out. If the commenter has a GitHub account, they can sign in with GitHub inside the Drawer (on the Integrations pane) and then their comments will appear to come from their personal account instead of the Netlify bot.

Your reviewer might not be on your GitHub team however, nor should that be a requirement. We prevent personally-identifying information like names and email addresses from syncing to third-parties where that user is not on the team, so unfortunately we can’t include their name here at this time.

Sorry we can’t address this pain point for you at the moment. Can you elaborate more on “replay functionality” – something like HotJar/FullStory? Let us know if you have more additional feedback!

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@jasonb thanks for the response

Thanks for reaching out. If the commenter has a GitHub account, they can sign in with GitHub inside the Drawer

This feature suddenly stopped working. I’m logged in into github in the review toolbar, but my comments continue to be left as “netlify bot”

We prevent personally-identifying information like names and email addresses from syncing to third-parties where that user is not on the team

Maybe an option would be adding some explicit setting when the reviewer wants to leave his name. Otherwise this makes collaborating in the PR body between the Dev team and the Design/Q&A team who don’t have access to repos due to limited seats totally inconvenient.

Thanks

Thanks @modularcoder – responses inline

This feature suddenly stopped working. I’m logged in into github in the review toolbar, but my comments continue to be left as “netlify bot”

Does the GitHub account you signed in as have access to write to the pull request? If auth fails for any reason, it’ll fall back to Netlify bot. It’s possible that you could be logged into the drawer with a GitHub account that doesn’t have write access to the pull request.

Maybe an option would be adding some explicit setting when the reviewer wants to leave his name.

Good idea, I’ll pass this feedback on to the team. Ideally we’d update our ToS to include that the names of Reviewers may be shared with third parties like GitHub and GitLab, but until then, perhaps an opt-in like you suggested would suffice.

@jasonb

Does the GitHub account you signed in as have access to write to the pull request? If auth fails for any reason, it’ll fall back to Netlify bot. It’s possible that you could be logged into the drawer with a GitHub account that doesn’t have write access to the pull request.

I have access to write to GitHub PR (have admin scope on the repo), and logged in into the drawer netlify account and GitHub. Tried re-logging in but didn’t help

Good idea, I’ll pass this feedback on to the team. Ideally we’d update our ToS to include that the names of Reviewers may be shared with third parties like GitHub and GitLab, but until then, perhaps an opt-in like you suggested would suffice.

Would be really great and will improve the reviewer ↔ developer communication.

And this is how it appears on the GitHub PR

That’s odd @modularcoder, especially when you say that it suddenly stopped working.

Are you able to file an issue on the repo in the Integrations pane of the drawer? The Netlify bot doesn’t have permission to create issues, so I’m thinking that if you try to do that with your user account, a helpful error message will help us debug.

I’m wondering if your GitHub organization has OAuth App access restrictions enabled. Does the org of this repo have a green checkmark next to its name on this page?

Thanks for your patience and help in debugging!

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@jasonb thanks for the response.

Yeah, as expected couldn’t create an issue in the toolbar. Apparently seems because of the GitHub org security restrictions. Should be solved, thanks!

P.s. Really looking forward to enable sending reviewer name options to PRs feature for Non-github members :))

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