Please Improve Comments

[EricMagidson]

Here is a video explaining why I ask Canvas LMS to prioritize improving comments in the grade book.

https://youtu.be/nIqTFz0Qong

[chriscas]

Hi @EricMagidson,

Thanks for making that great screencast, it was definitely well done!  Personally, I do agree that comments should probably support HTML, but I also can somewhat understand why they don't, as the small comment boxes would struggle to to fix icons above, and I don't think most people would know keyboard shortcuts...

With that being said, we found some very related ideas to this have been submitted: [SpeedGrader] Hyperlinks in Assignment Comments - Instructure Community and [SpeedGrader] Allow HTML in Assignment Comments - Instructure Community.  While those are both closely related, they are not exactly the same as your request, since you're working form the grades page and not SpeedGrader. I'd think if either of those ideas were developed, they should apply to all comment areas, but Canvas engineers may not agree, so it's beneficial to have all possible ideas submitted to the Community's ideas area (the more you split your idea into individual components the better).  You may not be able to post there right now as a new user, but if you browse around the community a bit and rank up to Community member, you should gain access to make an idea posts pretty quickly.  You cold include your video in the new idea post(s) as well as it clearly shows what you're looking for.

I hope this helps a bit, even though I know it's a bit of extra "homework" for you.

-Chris

[EricMagidson]

@chriscas 

So to be frank, I have so many ideas for improvement of Canvas but if you look back on the links you provided you will see that these requests are years old and have yet to be implemented.  Just like I find that the announcements to not yet yas the ability to place a date to post and then another date to have them removed.  I have to spend so much time going back in and removing old announcements.  

I will let you know that Blackboard has had WYSIWYG editing in comments for over a decade.  I really do hope that Canvas would get on some of these suggested improvements that I see that have been requested for years.  

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi there, @EricMagidson ...

I'll just briefly add to what @chriscas has already stated.  I'm not sure if you've seen this specific part of the Community site, but there is a roadmap so that you can see exactly what Instructure has planned...based on feedback they have gathered from members here in the Community as well as other feedback methods:

Canvas Product Roadmap - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

As you can see, there's a lot that Instructure is working on.  Hope this will help in some way.

[chriscas]

Hi @EricMagidson,

I just wanted to say quickly that I do understand the frustration with the Idea process here.  I think I have have submitted 10-15 ideas myself over the years, and not sure if any of them have actually been developed.  Instructure has recently put a lot of work into the idea process though, and I'm hopeful there will be some development on community ideas soon.  Will they be my ideas?  Probably not...  But they will be someone's.  My colleagues would likely tell you that I have been a pretty big critic of the idea process over the past few years, but I do want to give the new process a chance and hope others will too.  Now come this time next year, if we've seen very little development of any ideas, the critic in me may come back again.

One thing I can say with high confidence is that ideas that aren't submitted to the ideas area are pretty much guaranteed to never happen.

-Chris

[paul_fynn]

@EricMagidson, On a similar note, currently I can import grades in bulk to an assignment via the UI, but I can't import comments. It might be possible using API, but that isn't something that we would be allowed to do. I'm not clear why it would be possible through API and not UI though.