I’ve been using Basecamp‘s web based service for a few days now to organize projects for my new position at Six Apart, and it’s generally worked well, but there are a bunch of things I find lacking after my experiences with the more robust ActiveCollab.

I just sent this feature request e-mail to their support department:

Several things after my first days working with Basecamp:

• No way to mark a discussion as complete or otherwise track which ones I need people to pay attention to? This is sort of big, as currently I’m going to be prefacing the titles with “DONE: ” or “IMPORTANT: “… which is kind of silly. Maybe they need tags or something.
• Nested projects. My organization currently consists of projects with “X: ” prepended to the title. It would be better to have a parent project. Unlimited levels should be possible. Projects should just be another type of thing projects can contain.

Smaller:

• Ability to re-order the display order of discussions, to do items, etc. in a project
• Multiple assignees to to do items, perhaps with a primary assignee
• Ability to comment on to do list items for clarification, etc., would be great
• Calendar events in specific time zone such that users can see events in local time, like Google Calendar works
• It’s not super clear to me what the difference is between a discussion and a text document. Just some style differences but otherwise functionally the same?

I know 37signals doesn’t care to track feature requests, so I guess I’m hoping one of these pushes you over the edge to develop it or I missed it! Thanks!

We’ll see if I get a miracle response!

My Basecamp setup

First response from Basecamp; pretty thorough, and lightning fast!

Hi Charlie,

Thanks a lot for using Basecamp and for sending this feedback my way!

There are loads of great ideas! The good news is that some of the features you’ve asked for already exist:

Ability to re-order the display order of discussions, to do items, etc. in a project

It’s true that you can’t re-order discussions, but you can change the order of to-do items in a list, and the order of to-do lists as well. Here’s a video that shows this feature in action: https://basecamp.com/help/videos/organizing-to-dos

Multiple assignees to to do items, perhaps with a primary assignee

This feature doesn’t exist, but there’s a good reason for that. We talked about this a lot and always end on the idea that if everyone is responsible for a task, then no one takes responsibility. If a task is too big for one person to handle, then maybe it can be broken down into smaller tasks that different people can take ownership of?

Ability to comment on to do list items for clarification, etc., would be great

You can comment on entire to-do lists or individual items within them. Just check out #5 of this help page explains how: https://basecamp.com/help/guides/projects/todo-lists

Calendar events in specific time zone such that users can see events in local time, like Google Calendar works

Each user of Basecamp has the ability to set their own time zone, so that all calendar items are shown in their local time. As one of Basecamp’s few Europe-based employees, I think this is brilliant. :) https://basecamp.com/help/guides/you/your-time-zone

As for your last question, I’m happy to explain the difference between a text document and a discussion. :) A discussion is a dialogue between two or more users of Basecamp, that parses out their individual comments and makes it clear who’s saying what. Of course, you can comment on text documents, but the idea is that you collaborate and produce some usable text at the end (which isn’t necessarily the goal of every discussion).

Hopefully these help pages do a good job of explaining the differences: * https://basecamp.com/help/guides/projects/text-docs * https://basecamp.com/help/guides/projects/discussions

Thanks a lot for the other ideas - I especially like the idea of nested projects to keep your work organised! I’m going to forward this onto our development team and see what they think. While I can’t promise that this will be, or can be, implemented, we’re always working hard to improve our products.

I hope this clarifies things! Just let me know if you have any other questions, and I’ll be happy to help. :)

Have a fantastic Monday!

My followup

Thank you, that was very helpful.

I did indeed miss that commenting on to do list items is already possible.

Regarding the calendar items and timezones, I figured out the time is indeed changed for users in other time zones, but it seems to depend on computer system time, and has nothing to do with the time set in the user profile. This should be made clearer, though, as I had no idea I should be creating events in my local time. This project is for collaboration between a US team and Japan team, and I was making the events in US time, not realizing they were showing up a day early for the US team.

One other thing I didn’t mention is I have been wanting to nest to do lists under discussions. I have a bunch of discussions that are oriented around discussing something we want to do, and when we decide on some of those things, I then make a to do list with the same name as the discussion, and that also seems silly!

Their followup

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for getting back to me, and sorry for the confusion about time zones! I hope that help page I sent explained it well enough - that Basecamp uses the setting on your “Me” page to time delivery of timed email notifications, and the time according to your computer for timestamping things like calendar entries and completed tasks. Let me know if that’s still not clear!

Your latest idea is certainly an interesting one. We know the importance of nesting comments under to-do lists, but I for one hadn’t thought of doing it the other way around! This idea, and the one about unlimited levels of nested projects, would certainly challenge the simplicity at the heart of Basecamp - but are still worth discussing. I’ll talk to the development team about this, and we’ll see what happens. :)

Just let me know if you have any other questions, and I’ll be happy to help. :)