“Nice piece of guidance, this is surely a time-saver and puts ‘common errors’ or ‘things to look out for’ in a relatively prominent place.”

Thank you!

“I wonder though how you deal with this when there are a lot of posts in the question and comments section of a project.”

Currently I use headings and Markdown formatting to make my comments more readable and referencable by all who choose to view a project’s comments. N.B. although the HOT TM comment box states “Markdown supported” it does not support all the formatting features at the time of writing.

I also use the provided hashtags and @ so that the relevant parties are notified, when I think it’s appropriate. e.g.

“Sometimes there are several pages of posts and the mapper may struggle to understand which is being referred to. Would having a direct hyperlink to an individual post in the questions and comments section help with that?”

Maybe…Maybe not.

I think that some other relevant questions here are: Are contributors looking at the project comments in the first place? If not, why not? My personal experience would lead me to believe that, the answer to the first question is generally no. The second, I have no idea.

I use standard messages and templates to reduce the workload, and so I make them as generally applicable as possible. Assuming that I cannot predict what the problems with a project/task may be in advance, and that I probably won’t go back to every task to leave a link to a specific post in the project comments retroactively: I don’t think that it would be very useful for me while contributing to a project.

It may be beneficial to simply direct contributors to the project comments more generally (which is what I do currently), because the situation may have changed, and there may be new information there that’s relevant to them.

It may however, be useful to someone who has the ability to change project instructions, or apply comments to tasks of a certain state automatically. It may also be beneficial, if the comment on that project is to be referenced elsewhere like on slack, for example.

Your question has ispired me to make an addition to my standard validation message. Thinking proactively, I could link to the questions and comments section like this rather than just telling mappers to check them, so that they don’t have to look for it, if they don’t usually visit that section of a project.