Publish your discussions
Yes, non-protected discussions were actually accessible already. And nothing has changed in this matter: Spreading the URL of a discussion lets other cowriters work on the text without having to log in.
The news here is that you can explicitly publish your texts and in this way make them accessible to the site-wide-search.
The published discussions appear on the users profile. So if you’re a cowriter and know the user’s name but can’t remember the title not to mention the URL, you can also go that way.

Search
Imagine a friend told you he published the discussion on doingText for that event. But damn! What’s the link? And where was that email again? Or could it be he twittered it the other day? Hum, nothing found. Maybe, he skyped it…?
To get you out of those time-stealing situations there is now a site-wide search for published discussions. It searches the discussion titles so all you have to do is entering a keyword of the title.

The nice thing about it: You don’t have to be logged in to use the search. The search form appears already on the starting page. This is also good for you registered users. You only want to look up something you don’t quite remember. You hurrily have to download that text for the next meeting. You just want to show a discussion passage to someone while talking about the project and don’t want to bother with logging in first. For all those situations the search will be your helping hand.

However, there is a little constraint here: The search only catches explicitly published texts. With that there still is the control of the “owner” of a discussion to distinguish between making a text available for certain cowriters and make it available for whomever is interested in the topic.

New design of the sharing settings

Along with publish- and the search-option, the sharing settings got a new design. The table gives you more than quick the information on who can read, write, comment and search for your text.

There are also some news for the discussions themselves.

UTF-8
Do you care to write, for example, cyrillic or chinese signs? No problem. DoingText now supports UTF-8 encoding.

Relation of comment balloon and line and opening the comments section
This one falls into the category “little change, great effect”. There is now a little arrow going from the comment balloon to the related line. It makes the comment function easier to relate to the recent version of a line which makes working in doingText easier for you.

Opening the comments section is now combined with the edit mode. That means, whenever you directly enter a line you get the comments section with all the changes automatically shown. Vice versa, opening the comments will open the edit mode.
Here we have a question. When you switch to other lines to see the changes/comments there, the edit mode of the previous chosen line stays open. Does that bother you in some way? Please leave your word down in the comments or in the Feedback Forum on uservoice.

Notes on bug fixes
The deletion of discussions was broken and the News Feed showed a wrong date. That is now solved.
The list of discussions in the header is now case insensitive.