FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

The Basics

What is NowComment® in a nutshell?
NowComment is the most sophisticated group collaboration app available for discussion and annotation of online documents. Its many unique features include a user interface that encourages rich, in-depth conversations by showing threaded comments "in context" with the original document. Group members start or join conversations on whatever passages they find interesting and important, intellectually engaging in ways not possible in face-to-face class discussion.

What documents can NowComment handle?
NowComment works best with HTML web pages and Microsoft Word documents (with all Track Changes edits and deletions accepted), but it accepts any documents whose text characters run left to right (including but not limited to English and Romance language documents) and whose text can be copy-and-pasted into a standard HTML text entry box.

What's special about HTML web documents and Microsoft Word documents?
NowComment can break these documents down into sentences and preserve rich text formatting (e.g. bold, italics, underlining) and pictures. If you have a document that's neither Word-formatted (.doc, .docx, .rtf) nor HTML you can probably do a "Save-As", or use a converter application, to get it into one of those formats. See our file upload hints page.

Can NowComment handle graphics, animations, and embedded videos (multimedia objects)?
Yes, they can be both displayed and commented upon (they're treated as paragraphs). NowComment can handle both images (jpeg, png, gif, tif, and svg formats) and embedded audio/video that's copied from HTML pages; Microsoft Word can handle images but doesn't allow embedded video.

What group sizes are appropriate for NowComment?
NowComment has been successfully tested with both very small groups (e.g. 4-5 people collaborating on writing projects) and large groups of 50+ users. There are no size limits per se; the software is designed to accommodate hundreds, even thousands, of readers commenting on a single document.

Can NowComment be used with third-party user authentication systems?
NowComment is standards-compliant and should "play well" with other systems. UVA is using Shibboleth to authenticate users and that's working well.

Why are there “word balloons” in the document text?
Speech bubbles appear at the beginning of paragraphs, and at the end of sentences, that have been commented on. The number of comments is given inside the bubble. Clicking on a passage’s speech bubble lets you browse the conversations already underway on that passage. General comments about the document as a whole appear at the end of the document.

Why is a comment summary line required?
Clear summary lines take just a few seconds to write but help each member of the group skim (especially in the 2-Pane view) to find the comments most relevant to them. This minimizes “information overload” for documents with lots of comments.


Reading and Adding Comments

What are the advantages of each of the four views?
  • 2-Pane: The comments are easily available to you (in a separate pane) so you can read the document with minimal distraction.
  • Comments in Context: Both the text and all the comments are together in one window; no clicking is needed to see the comments. This view is often best with tabular documents.
  • Comments Only: This view shows only the comments (not the document itself) and lets you sort those comments by date, by person, or by document sequence. You can use the sort by person feature to review each person’s contributions to the discussion.
  • Document Only: Shows only the document, no comments. Some people prefer this “ultra clean” view when reading a document for the first time.

How do I limit who looks at or posts comments on my documents?
Unless you specifically change your document from Private (to default) to Public, only people or Groups you explicitly share the document will be able to see it and comment on it.

Can I include active hyperlinks in my comments?

Yes, you can just type in the URL in the body of the comment (make sure to include the initial http:// or https://). URLs input into the Summary Line will show but won't be active (clickable).

Why can’t I see all of the comments on a document?
Two possibilities:

  1. You may have changed your View setting to Document Only View; to see comments, change that setting to one of the other three views.
  2. The document owner (uploader) can control whether, or as of what date, others who are invited to the document can see the comments made by other invitees (the document owner can always see all the document comments). This may be the case for your document, check with the document owner.

What are tags used for?
Tags (keywords) let those uploading documents and uploading comments make them easier for others to find. Tags can be free form, or your group can come up with preset categories (e.g. a writing class may want to categorize comments as grammar, style, or content... a company might want to organize comments as marketing, financial, management, or other). You can sort comments by tag in Comment Only view to see every comment made from a given perspectives (e.g. a political science class might want to sort all comments made by Democrats vs. Independents vs. Republicans) .

How long should it take to upload a file?
Though the speed of your Internet connection (and broadband upload speeds are usually quite a bit slower than download speeds) and the file size are the main factors, they're not the only factors. Network congestion on occasion can dramatically slow Internet throughput... and while our server can handle many uploading documents at a time, it's possible that it could become overloaded. It never hurts to wait a minute or two and then retry the upload if you run into a problem.


NowComment Compared to Other Tools

Using any desktop PC application (like Microsoft Word) to circulate files for commenting has four inherent disadvantages:

  • Inefficiency: Someone has to play the role of editor to gather and organize all the comment from each person’s file (and it’s even worse if no one takes this role, because then each person has to read everyone else’s drafts!)
  • Redundancy: Since no one knows what their peers have already said you get lots of redundant comments, a big waste of time for both the writers and all the readers.
  • Delays seeing new comments: The group’s project/goal is delayed because no one sees anyone else’s comments until they get compiled (a really big problem if the compilation has to wait until everyone turns their comments in).
  • Version control problems: If any group members turn in their comments late, after a new draft based on the on-time comments has been created, then integrating comments made on the old draft with the current draft can be a nightmare.

NowComment eliminates all these problems: you can ensure that people are always commenting on the current version, and their comments appear right away for everyone to see (so unless you’re using NowComment to draft a consensus next draft, no one ever has to compile the responses!).

Microsoft Word
Though Word has powerful collaborative editing capabilities (“Track Changes”), its document commenting capabilities are limited, and it can’t handle true discussion (organization of comments into threaded conversations). None of its collaboration capabilities scale well beyond more than a handful of people; the screens get too cluttered and it’s hard to grasp who’s saying what. NowComment is also much easier to use and learn.

Blogs
Blogs let writers create new online documents; reader comments on those documents are not necessarily important or even allowed. NowComment is specifically designed to elicit and organize reader comments. You can use NowComment very effectively as a “super blog” for in-depth discussion of new documents, but you can also use it to discuss books, news and journal articles, essays, and other existing documents.

Wikis
Wikis let anyone change the content of a document. NowComment lets you comment on, but not change, a document.

Google Docs
Google Docs allows you to share documents with others, but its discussion capabilities are limited (e.g. allows commenting on lines rather than logical units like sentences and paragraphs). Like Word its screen gets crowded and disorganized when there are more than a few comments.

“Sticky Note” programs
Many programs let you insert “sticky notes” on a document to show comments. None of the ones we’ve seen worked well when more than a few people were making comments; the screen gets very cluttered, the notes aren’t easily organized into coherent conversations, and there aren’t good (if any) sorting capabilities. NowComment organizes and sorts comments without cluttering the screen.


If there's a Software Problem

Are there any known issues or bugs?
Like all software, some... but we think not too many. We maintain a list here.

We hope you never run into one on our site, but if you do one of these tips should get you going again quickly:

  • Problem logging onto the site

    • make sure you aren't trying to access an old or duplicate account (each person should have just one account) or using a personal email address instead of a school or business address
    • double-check your password and email address for a subtle "typo" — typing a period instead of a comma, leaving out a letter, duplicating a letter, typing the letter "o" instead of the number zero or the letter "l" instead of the number one, etc.
    • check capitalization (especially with passwords); could the Caps Lock key be on by mistake?

    If your password isn't working (even if you're sure you've entered the right one!) enter just your email address in the homepage login box and then click the "Forgot your Password?" link; we'll email you instructions for resetting the password. If you never receive that reset email then you either used a different email address for your NowComment account or a spam filter is blocking that email from reaching you.

  • You've entered something (filled out a form, clicked on a URL) and something isn't working

    • it's often a subtle "typo" (see list above)
    • sometimes what you typed isn't in the requested format — you forgot an http:// in front of the www. in a URL, the software is expecting a date in "6-30-2012" format and you input a 2-digit year "6-30-12"), etc.

  • If a page on our site is badly formatted or isn't loading at all

    • Try a similar page on our site (e.g. a Public Document on our site, one of your older documents, another group, another folder) to see if the same problem occurs twice. If the second page is OK, it's good to know there's a problem with a particular page rather than with NowComment in general.
    • Our site requires the use of JavaScript and some pop-ups; if you using any blocking software for these you should put in nowcomment.com as an allowed exception.
    • If you have easy access to another computer, or a friend is handy, try doing the same thing on another computer and see if you get the same result.
    • Try that same page in another browser (especially if you're using Internet Explorer; sometimes IE can be quirky). Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera are all free and easy to download and install.

If these tips don't solve the problem, we're happy to look into it; here's the important information that will help us identify and resolve the problem:

  1. A clear and fairly detailed description of the problem; the more descriptive the better (to give us more clues!).

  2. The URL of the page on our site you're having the problem with.

  3. The email address you use to log in to your account (if different from the email you're using to emailing us).

  4. The exact wording of any Error Message(s) you received, both the "header" message (e.g. "Server Error 500") and any details given below that header. If you can't copy-and-paste this information a screenshot showing the page URL and the error message would be great. You probably don't need any special screen capture software to do this; it's built into most operating systems (see this Wikipedia article). Save the screenshots to your machine (or paste them into a "paint" or word processer first and then save that document) and then attach them to your email.

  5. As much information about your operating system and browser as possible (e.g. Windows 7 version 6.1 with Firefox 9.0.1, or Mac OS X 10.6.4 with Safari 5.0.1).

  6. As much context information as possible — what you were trying to do when the problem occurred, what keys you had just hit, what steps you had just finished, etc.

Email this information (if possible, with "before and after" screenshots showing what you did and what happened after you did it) to one of the tech support resources found on our Contact Us page) and we'll try to help you as quickly as possible.