How do I see new code comments in a PR without re-reading the entire PR?

[oakkitten]

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I feel like I'm missing something obvious here.

I sometimes review PRs that gather hundreds of code comments, and are force-pushed many times. After I am done, the next day I'm struggling with following the new comments from other developers—these seem to be appear all over the place. Specifically,

• When someone adds a new non-review code comment to an earlier discussion, it only appears at the place where the original discussion took place, which might be way up the page. This might be in a comment that's hidden because there's too many comments, so I have to unhide all comments to make sure there are no developments. If the conversation was resolved and is collapsed, a new comment does not uncollapse the conversation, so I have to uncollapse all conversations as well.

• When someone adds a new review code comment in an already existing conversation, it appears on the timeline (wew!), but there are no references to the previous conversation. So I often find myself Ctrl-F'ing the comment text for the context.

• There seems to be no way to single out conversations that I am participating in.

While I have found a browser addon that lets me unhide/uncollapse many comments at once, which helps, I still have to re-read the entire PR to find new commentary. Is there a better way? Am I missing something? Are there perhaps external tools that can help here? I feel like simply displaying all code commentary in chronological order with links to their original locations would help a lot.

[samus-aran]

Hi @oakkitten 👋

That sounds like some thorough feedback! I personally don't have the experience of reviewing that many comments in a single PR 🤯 So I can only make simple suggestions. Could the filter by conversations be of use? Other Community members has highlighted the ability to filter by commented conversation would be nice - would you agree to be useful in your situation?

[oakkitten]

I suppose this situation is not very common when only experienced contributors are involved. We are participating in GSoC and in some cases the PRs gather many comments by mentors, updates by the mentee, and following reviews.

I don't think the dropdown conversation list would help here as it is now.

• The list seems to be ordered by the date of the first comment. This is already what I can see in Conversation tab; what I want would be ordering by the last comment.

• Conversation list is hard to navigate when you have 100s of conversations and no filtering or search options.†

• Clicking on “outdated” conversations only gives you

  We went looking everywhere, but couldn’t find those commits.
  Sometimes commits can disappear after a force-push.

  In the PR I'm looking at, out of 118 conversations only 13 are not outdated, which renders the above complaints moot.

† Another thing I find frustrating is inability to search code comments. I mention Ctrl+F above, but in order for it to work, I have to unhide & uncollapse all conversations. With 100s of them, it gets tedious even with refined-github which allows unhiding more & uncollapsing in bulk. And since I have an older computer, this means waiting for 5 minutes for the page to become responsive.

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