Get rid of 'resolve comment' functionality
Problem to solve
There is a lot of confusion around what the difference between Resolve discussion and Resolve comment is. This is amplified by our UI that relies on icons and tooltips for resolvable comments. It does not help that the two actions are often extremely close to each other and the associated tooltip for a resolvable comment so far said Mark as resolved without mentioning whether it meant the discussion or just the comment.
It also creates problems in situations like the following:
- Person A resolves a comment
- Person B resolves the discussion
- Person A unresolves the discussion
In the scenario above, all comments are unresolved again, even though Person A had already resolved the individual comment.
There also is a lot of functionality around the discussions, e.g. unresolved discussions blocking merge requests or the possibility to jump to unresolved discussions. None of this exists for comments.
Proposal
Looking at how often this feature is being used, we should consider getting rid of resolvable comments altogether, so we can avoid this confusion. For every use case I heard so far, there are workarounds such as adding a checkmark icon, which do not have the same problems as our current UI solution and do not make our interface even more complex.
Note: the top comment resolve checkmark now needs to resolve the whole thread and not just the individual root note. See: #28750 (comment 342982972)
@jramsay You might have heard of good use cases, certainly have a better understanding of how often it's being used and how valuable it is to our users, would love to hear your opinion.
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
No pushback from our community.
Future work
- Clean up backend tech debt of parts that are no longer used (since we're removing the ability to resolve per comment). The API could be part of this.