Comment links only work under some circumstances

[matthewkbridges]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

Expected behavior:
Comment links (in this form: https://github.com/myorg/myrepo/pull/1#discussion_r3033127) should, when opened, reliably open to the comment in question so that the user can see the exact comment being referenced. This was the established behavior for quite some time.

Observed behavior:
Most comment links do not link to the specific comment, instead only opening up the Conversation tab, forcing the user to 'hunt' manually for the comment being referenced.

Details:
Comment links on pull requests used to always link to the specific comment, scrolling right to it in the Conversation tab. Now, this only works if the comment happens to be one of the comments displayed in the default comment listing on the Conversation tab. So, comments that are listed as "resolved", or simply aren't on the default listing (if there are many comments on a given PR), won't be easily linked to. Instead, the comment link will bring you to the Conversation tab and you have to manually expand the comment list and/or show resolved comments to hunt down the proper comment.

This breaks some workflow I have where I link to specific comments when discussing remediations that need to be done.

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[rdeodoo]

This has been working fine for years but completely stopped working for me on Chrome (didn't try any other browser).

Important note: it is not just about manually getting a comment URL, the links received by email are also all broken

I've been linking very old PR comments as some sort of "guidelines" / "documentation" in newer PRs, but all those links no longer open the comment anymore. So this is not only affecting recent PR comments, but seems to be a global behavior change.

Old example: odoo/odoo#133905 (comment)
It should open the first comment on the addons/website/static/src/snippets/s_instagram_page/options.js file within the review made on Sep 28, 2023: odoo/odoo#133905 (review)

Recent example: odoo/odoo#258018 (comment)
It should open the third comment of the first review.

(The review link itself scrolls fine, as it points to the review rather than to a specific comment.)

To add to this, it seems this stopped working a few months ago, exactly at the same time as another feature stopped working: you can no longer Alt + Click on a resolved comment to open all other resolved comments in one go (from the main PR screen).

Which makes the initial reported issue even worse, since you sometimes have to manually show hundreds of resolved comments one by one.

Note that Alt + Click still works fine to fold/unfold all files from the /files PR view.

[rphair]

This has actually been killing me & my team (cc @Ryun1 @perturbing), who use GitHub for document review which constantly needs to reference discussion points around text & sometimes code changes. As soon as a discussion point is resolved, we lose our link confirming why the change was made.

This is so crippling that we've started having to leave settled points unresolved so they don't get buried behind the "accordion" and are lost to us & reviewers until we hunt for them manually again.

So... if GitHub has suppressed these in the UI as an "optimisation" — so it doesn't have to fetch them from its back-end — it's just as likely to blow back into extra work to fetch & render them on repositories like ours, where we now have to keep otherwise collapsible deep-linked comments exposed preemptively.