Allow comments on study documents

[rcelina]

it would be nice to have a "comment function" for the study documents, there are two reasons for that... first most summarys have a comment to contact the person who wrote it if any mistakes are found, in addition the writers put their e-mail address. with a comment function it wouldn't be nessecairy for the writers to publish their e-mail address. Second, it would be great to have the comment function especially for exams so if someone needs help with an specific exercise they can get help easily.

[NotSpecial]

Thank you for your suggestion. I think that the current implementation already covers the email parts and general comments might require quite a lot of effort and I'm unsure whether we have the capacity for this.

Email Address

In general, we must differentiate the author of a set of documents from the uploader.

The uploader is the user which uploaded the files.
The author is usually the uploader, but could also e.g. be a professor which originally provided a script.

In general, if we spot any mistakes, we want to contact the uploader, as this is the person that can actually change the uploaded files.

As the uploader is an api user, any other api user can see the nethz shortname and use that to contact the uploader.

Thus, no comment function is needed for this, as the necessary information is available.

Comment Management

To be actually useful, comments would require a forum- or chat-like functionality that would alert users of new comments or responses to their comments, or allow to be notified if there are comments to a document they care about.

While technically possible, this will take quite some time to implement.

Usefulness

I have checked the current study documents on the website, which allow comments.
I could not find a single document with more than 2 comments, even in the Basisjahr, where all students look at the same documents. Furthermore, I'd say 99% of documents to not have any comments at all.

It doesn't seem to me like there is much need for this functionality from our students and think we should prioritize more pressing issues.

And in general, I'm not sure if we should include any functionality that is not really needed, as every additional line of code makes maintaining the API harder.

What do you think? Do you have any concrete examples where the comment function is actually used that I might have missed?