Discussing a maintenance item

Every maintenance item has a discussion under it. It is the place for what the audit trail cannot hold: what you found when you got there, what you tried, what it will take, and what somebody should bring next time.

Adding a remark

On the dashboard: open the item — from the Maintenance list or from its pin on the map — and the discussion is under the item's details. Type, and press Post.

In the field app: Maintenance → tap the item → scroll to the bottom of the sheet. Same box, same button.

You can attach up to four photos to a remark. On the field app they come from the camera or the roll like every other photo in the app, and you can mark them up before they go.

Anyone on your team can add a remark, including volunteers. Seeing a problem and being able to say so are the same thing, so this is not behind a permission.

Removing one

You can always remove your own. Removing somebody else's needs the Triage maintenance reports permission — owners and managers have it, and you can grant it to other roles under Settings → Roles & permissions.

That split is deliberate. "I said that and I want it gone" and "that should not be on our item" are different requests, and a conversation anybody can quietly edit is not a record of anything.

Who said it

A remark is signed with the name of the person who wrote it.

There is one exception, and it is the one that confuses people: a remark from a business working one of your trails through a share is signed with the company's name and carries a Partner label. It is the same rule the item itself follows — an outside crew is identified by who they work for, because a personal name you cannot look up in your own Team list tells you nothing about who is on your ground.

Who gets told

Everyone on the team gets a notification when a remark is added to an item, carrying the remark itself rather than "somebody commented" — enough to decide whether it needs you without opening the app.

To stop them, turn off Maintenance discussion under Profile → Email preferences. Every notification email carries an unsubscribe link for its own kind, so you can also switch this one off from the footer of one you have just received.

With no signal

A remark typed in the field app with no connection is queued on the phone. It shows in the thread straight away with Waiting for sync on it, in a lighter shade with an amber edge, and it sends itself the next time the phone has a connection — you do not have to come back to it.

Its photos go up with it, in one piece. A remark that says "look at this" arriving hours before the photograph would be worse than one that waits.

You can see everything queued under the sync icon in the field app header; a waiting remark is listed there as Comment.

Reading one you have already downloaded

The field app keeps the discussion on each item you open, so opening it again out of signal shows what it knew at the last sync — labeled Last synced so you know you may be reading an old version of the conversation.

An item you have never opened on that phone has nothing to show. It says so rather than sitting on a spinner.