Internal comments and @mentions

An internal comment is a note on a conversation that only your teammates can see. It lives in the conversation’s own timeline, underneath the customer’s message, so the decision and the thing it is about stay together.

Leaving one

The comment box sits at the foot of the thread and is a different box from the reply box. It is always there, styled differently, and its placeholder says who can see it: “Visible to teammates in Support”. “Sent an internal note to the customer by accident” is the failure worth designing against.

Enter posts. Shift ↵ starts a new line. The box takes **bold**, _italic_, `code` and > quoted lines, has an emoji picker, and takes attachments up to 25 MB: drop a file, or paste a screenshot straight in. Images show inline in the thread.

@mentions

Type @ and start a name. Pick the teammate and they get a notification, they are subscribed to the conversation, and the mention counts in their Mentions badge in the sidebar whether or not the conversation is assigned to them. The chips under the box are a shortcut for the same thing.

You can only mention people who are members of that inbox. Someone who cannot see the conversation cannot be pulled into it.

Why not forward it

Forwarding splits the context: the customer’s thread is in one place and the conversation about it is in another, usually someone’s personal inbox or a chat channel. Six weeks later, nobody can reconstruct why the decision was made.

Comments are also searchable. in:comments annual discount finds the thread where someone explained the discount policy, even though those words appear nowhere in the customer’s mail. See Search.

Who hears about it

Commenting subscribes you to the conversation. Everyone subscribed is notified of later comments, and subscribers are notified when the customer replies, so a thread you weighed in on does not move on without you. See Notifications.

Reactions, pins, quotes and edits

• React with an emoji when the answer is “yes, agreed” and a whole comment would be noise. Hover a reaction to see who.
• Pin to top the comment that holds the decision, so it stays above a long thread. Anyone can pin or unpin.
• Reply on a comment quotes it into your new one, for a thread with several discussions running.
• Edit your own comment. It gets an edited marker and does not notify anyone again. Comments cannot be deleted, so the record of a decision stays a record.

Personal inboxes

Mentions work in shared inboxes. In your own personal inbox there is nobody to mention, because no one else can see it. You can still leave yourself a note.