Comments within a federated share should be made visible to all federated parties

[didierm]

In the context of a (federated) share, we consider comments as a valuable means of communication and hence an essential part of the collaboration effort.

While we appreciate use cases where tags are being contained to the server where they are initially created and stored, we deem it appropriate to make comments within a federated share available to all parties having access to that share.

Steps to reproduce

1. For collaboration purposes, UserA federates a share (shareX) on serverA to UserB on ServerB ;
2. UserA creates comments in the shareX realm ;
3. UserB creates comments in the shareX realm.

Expected behaviour

Parties with access to shareX (i.e. both UserA and UserB) should see all comments in this share's realm.

Actual behaviour

UserA only sees his/her own shareX comments (stored on ServerA), UserB only sees his/her own shareX comments (stored on ServerB).

Server configuration

Nextcloud version: 10.0.1

Workflow proposal :

• Add a 'public/private' boolean field to table oc_comments (defaulting to private) ;

• When a share is federated, disclose a [public] checkbox next to the [Post] button in the UI, allowing (new) comments to be made public ;

• For performance and privacy reasons, comments which are tagged public are stored in or transferred to table oc_comments on the server hosting the share, private comments are stored on or transferred to the user's server;

• Reversal from public to private status and vice versa can only be executed by the comment owner [oc_comments.actor_id].

[jancborchardt]

Comments should simply work for federated shares. No need for a private/public switch (that would only be for shared links, see #2019).

cc @blizzz @schiessle

[blizzz]

We had this discussion some time ago, that sometimes you want to have comments available to any recipients, but sometimes only internal (e.g. when sharing to a partner or customer while having comments with sensitive content). I don't think we had a good idea to solve this back then.

[sunjam]

So there is no way to comment with another federated user about your shared files? ☹️

[blizzz]

@sunjam currently, no

@schiessle weren't you drafting a masterplan for federation advancements?