Need to be able to share read-only view of paper

[arfon]

One issue that's come up a few times is the need for authors to be able to share a read-only view of the review UI. This is so they can share the review comments with their co-authors.

Originally we had ideas for the 'collaborator' role serving this need but I think this is over-engineering this feature (authors would presumably have to invite people etc to view).

Instead, I'd like us to have a 'share' URL that an author could share with their colleagues that would render the review UI without any options to comment. Instead it would just allow people to see the current state of the review.

@freelanceastro we chatted about this ages ago and I managed to loose track of this feature request (which I think is pretty important).

@marcrohloff - any ideas how this could be implemented?

[marcrohloff]

A couple of thoughts

• If we make it possible to provide a read only view using the current URL scheme then we make it possible for almost anybody to view comments because review URLs are very easy to guess. (If we go this route we could mitigate it by using the paper SHA instead of the paper identifier as the url, though anybody could in theory query the API to get a SHA)

• I was thinking about this a couple of days ago. It would be advantageous for other collaborators to be able to respond to comments - the submitter may not be the best person to respond to a query. Given that we already have components to 'Add A Reviewer' it wouldn't be too much work to let the Submitter Add a Collaborator. This would be on the order of 1 to 3 hours.

If you want to try this, the place to start is where I set paper.can_view_annotations in oj-review-page.html. If you remove a restriction here just make sure to add it to can_edit_annotations on the next line.