Option to change sort order of comments on files

[myyysha]

This is a very recent change, a day old or so.

In a recent Dropbox facelift, there's been a functional change in sorting comments on multiple-page files such as PDF. The comments used to be sorted primarily by the PDF page they refer to, currently they are only sorted chronologically by creation time.

While I understand both sortings may have its use, for writing rulebooks and other DTP work with group revisions, the previous method "sort by PDF page" was WAY better - and I didn't find, how to choose my preferred comments-sorting. Is there a way to do that, please?

(Also, I'd appreciate if a Dropbox folder could display the number of comments each file has in the very file list, but let's dream on, I guess.)

[Walter]

This idea has been closed as it has reached the end of the Share an Idea process.

Thank you for your suggestion, and if you have another idea to share, please do! 

[Lusil]

Hey @myyysha, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this! I’ve made sure to pass your comments along to the dev team for future consideration. 

I’ve also moved your post to the Share an idea section of the Community to keep track of your feedback. 

If you have any other ideas you’d like us to forward, don’t hesitate to get back to us. Cheers!

[Daphne]

This idea is going to need a bit more support.

We've updated the status to encourage more users to back you up!

[nkopp2]

This definitely needs to get done! I loved having the comments by page and now commenting via dropbox has been made almost useless as it's so much harder to use. I'm definitely going to have to find another solution for PDF revisions if this isn't fixed. 

[Scarleterrific]

Yes, yes, yes and yes!!! I completely agree with @myyysha and @nkopp2;

I think it is ridiculous that the first thing that pops up when I do an online search for "dropbox comment order by page" is this thread.

It is a sorting order function, just like all the other sorting order functions Dropbox already allows.

Scrolling through the "comments in order of page" makes far more sense when navigating the pdf-file within the comment section, rather then navigating the comment-section within the pdf-file. You get to skip the content list / scrolling through the pdf-file looking for "yellow boxes" (which still doesn't direct to the comment btw).

Me or my colleague could just open the comment section; easily see all the pages that are relevant in chronological order; use the hot-link to go to THAT page (comment on page 174? easy, scroll till you get to the 100-pages and narrow your search). Now if I add a comment to page 36 out of 500 pages that already have comments, the comment gets burried at the bottom, instead of being next to its counter-parts.

Sorry I am a bit passionate about this but I am honestly a bit pissed; comments are a good on-the-fly note-taking tool for my university books (a perk of the comment order), but the lack of chronological order based on page makes it horribly unsuited right now (forcing me to now find an alternative and convert my comments to some other document, so I can actually find things).

[Popmouth]

Honestly, it's pretty aweful that this isn't an option already. I hope you fix this soon.

[nicole_eva]

My exact question! Thanks for highlighting this, really hope it becomes a feature STAT. it's irritating as heck right now.

[keaneangle]

Hi, same suggestion. Chronological sort is dumb, by page is 100% more logical. This is killing me, and I might move my hosting because of it. I use this feature for commenting with clients. Chronological is absolutely useless for me. I've even had clients complain. Please fix...

[keaneangle]

Follow up, yup, I'm switching. This is awful for collecting feedback and implementing it on a document.

[Jonathan Haring]

Agree with the above comments! Seems like such a basic feature to be able to sort comments based on either page number OR post date. As a designer using comments for design and content edits on PDFs for clients (documents that are often 50+ pages), it is an incredible hassle to go through all of the comments out of order to ensure I both see and correct everything (markers on single letters or other small design details are often difficult to see visually).

[myyysha]

Hey everyone!

Thanks for the support!

As it appears Dropbox would remain this way, our team switched to QuickReviewer. It's reasonably cheap (free in the basic version), got all the features mentioned here and DOESN'T have the recent Dropbox bug, which makes it impossible to scroll zoomed PDF entirely to the left. Oh and above all, it's relatively fast to operate, when managing the comments.

There are several such solutions online, but all others I tried were pretty expensive or somewhat hard to operate. This one just worked for us well.