Comments and activity on an Operation

Every Operation has two parallel streams: a Comments thread that you and your team write deliberately, and an Activity log that NearbySpy writes automatically. Together they answer two different questions — what happened, and what we said about it.

Comments

Comments are short messages attached to a single Operation. Use them for the working talk that surrounds an Operation: shift handoffs, plate numbers to watch for, notes on what to ask in tomorrow's interview, a flag that an upload is missing the metadata you need.

Comments are written by Case members with the Investigator, Admin, or Owner role. Viewers can read but not write. Clients can comment only on Operations that have been explicitly shared with them, and they only see other comments that were posted with Client visibility.

Internal vs Client-visible comments

NearbySpy treats internal comments as the default. If you have shared the Operation with the Client (see Controlling what Clients see on Operations), you can choose to post a comment that the Client will see. Internal comments are never exposed to Clients regardless of visibility — that is a hard rule, not a setting you can flip by accident.

Activity log

The Activity log is a system-generated record of state changes on the Operation. You do not write it; NearbySpy does. Typical entries include:

• Operation created, edited, or rescheduled.
• Status changes (Upcoming → In progress → Completed, and so on — see Operation types and statuses).
• Operator assignment and reassignment (see Assigning Operators to Operations).
• Evidence uploaded, archived, or restored.
• Visibility changed for Clients.
• Comments posted (the entry, not the body).

Activity entries are append-only. They cannot be edited, hidden, or deleted by anyone, including Owners. This is intentional — the Activity log is part of the audit trail that makes Operations defensible if work later ends up in a deposition, an insurance dispute, or court.

Order and grouping

Both streams are presented in reverse chronological order. Comments and Activity are interleaved on the Operation panel so you can see what happened and what was said about it in one timeline. Filters let you isolate one stream when the other is noisy.

Notifications

New comments produce a notification badge for Case members and assigned Operators. Activity entries do not, by default — they are too frequent to be useful as alerts. Mentions inside a comment also surface to the mentioned member's notifications inbox; see Investigator notifications and unread badges.

What lives in the Operation, what lives elsewhere

• Operation-scoped chatter belongs in Comments. Anything that talks about the Case as a whole belongs in Case Notes.
• Files belong in Evidence — never paste a download link into a comment as a substitute. See How Evidence upload and integrity (hashing) work.
• Schedule changes are logged automatically when you move the date on the calendar; see Using the in-case Calendar.

Best practices

• Write comments as if a court reporter will read them. Specific, factual, no slang.
• Use Client-visible comments sparingly and intentionally. Most updates belong in Messaging Clients, not in the Operation thread.
• If something important is wrong in the Activity log, post a Comment correcting it. Activity is permanent — corrections are how you reconcile honest mistakes without rewriting history.