The next chapter for transparency and commenting: HackMD Product Update | HackMD Blog
December 11, 2023

The next chapter for transparency and commenting: HackMD Product Update

Rachel Golden
Rachel Golden
Telling HackMD's story, building awareness, and meaningfully connecting with communities.

Over the past few months, HackMD has released a series of updates aimed at enhancing your commenting and overall product experience.

With a focus on empowering you to effortlessly track changes, connect with contributors, and engage more seamlessly within the platform, these updates promise to make collaboration easier than ever.

Activity Transparency

Transparency is key in collaborative environments. And especially so for remote teams.

With the latest product updates, you can now easily review all changes made to note titles, tags, and descriptions within the note settings under ‘Activity.’ If you want to take it a step further and see all edits made by contributors, those can be viewed in the Versions and GitHub Sync page (found in the top right drop down menu).

And say you want to see a snapshot of all the contributors to a particular note? You can now do that with the click of a button. Every note displays all of the contributors at the top of the page.

Contributors_HackMD

These improvements ensure better visibility into the evolution of notes, enabling you to track modifications and understand how your work is progressing.

Enhanced commenting experience

As some of you already noticed, we also made improvements to the commenting experience. Changes began in September and improvements from there were made to incorporate your feedback and suggestions. This feedback was critical for us to address concerns and create a feature you can successfully interact with day in and day out.

What has all been changed since then?

  • Increased character count: You can now express yourself more freely with an increased comment character limit from 500 to 1000.
  • Improved comment viewing: The comment feature now shows the entire comment while viewing, enabling a seamless reading experience.
  • Streamlined reply process: Clicking on a comment now opens the reply area immediately, eliminating any confusion about whether a reply can be made.
  • Dynamic input area: To ensure a smooth writing experience, the comment input area dynamically grows as you type, providing a comfortable space for longer responses.
  • Optimized modal trigger: Along with the above, we’ve refined the triggering of the “Continue Editing or Discard” modal to ensure it’s less intrusive.

These updates give you the visibility and control you need to collaborate with ease.

Build with HackMD

When it comes to efficient documentation and collaboration, having a high-quality tool is crucial for success.

And our passion is to create a platform that helps you reach your goals. But we’re not done yet – iteration is the name of the game. So if you have any suggestions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you!

Give us a shout on Twitter or Discord or click the Feedback button on the comment panel in HackMD to share your thoughts directly.

We can’t wait to see what you create.