Commenting for External Clients via Review Links Appears Broken (Even on Pro Plan)

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1

Hello Frame.io Community and Support Team,

I’m experiencing a critical issue with the commenting functionality for external clients on Frame.io review links, which is significantly disrupting my workflow.

Problem Description: Recently, I’ve discovered that the commenting feature for external clients is not working. Initially, when sharing review links, I repeatedly saw a message indicating that I needed to subscribe to a Pro plan to enable external client comments.

Today, I proceeded to subscribe to the Pro plan specifically to unlock this feature. However, to my dismay, even after upgrading, external clients are still unable to leave comments. When they attempt to post a comment, it consistently displays the error message: “Failed to send - Click to retry.”

I have already verified that the “Comments” function within the project’s Permissions settings is indeed enabled.

Impact on Workflow: This ongoing issue is causing significant frustration and inconvenience to my project review workflow. The inability for external clients to provide direct feedback via comments is a major bottleneck.

Context & Troubleshooting: I’ve also noticed a general increase in problems since the V4 upgrade, including the disappearance of our Slack automation notifications, which adds to the overall challenges.

Regarding the commenting issue, I have already tried switching to different network IPs, but the problem persists, and external clients are still unable to comment normally.

Seeking Community Input: Has anyone else in the community encountered this problem with external client commenting, especially after upgrading to Pro or since the V4 update? Any insights or potential solutions would be immensely helpful.

Thank you for your time and assistance.

1 Like
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@Ian Thank you for explaining, I have escalated this internally to see if we can reproduce. Would you be able to provide a screen recording of the issues you’re seeing? Also, have you reached out to support with this issue as well?

3

Are there any updates on this issue? We have clients who are also experiencing the same problem. Here is a screenshot that shows the error.

frameio_error
frameio_error666×760 39.5 KB

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Hi @aesterling thanks for sending this along. Can you confirm how this is being reproduced? Is this via the API or is this specific to shares being shared to external team members? Any steps you can provide would be helpful in reproducing and being able to send along to the team to investigate

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Hi @CharlieAnderson a client experienced this error when attempting to leave a comment on a video accessed by a share link. I’m happy to share the link privately, but specific details on the client’s browser settings, etc are limited. I also reached out to Frame.io support separately about the issue but got a stock response about disabling ad-blockers, etc.. Thanks!

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do you happen to know if they were signed into frame.io, or was just leaving an anonymous comment, or something of the sort?

Also heard back from our eng team asking: “are there special characters that are blurred out here?”

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I don’t believe the client was signed in to frame.io when leaving the comment. I have asked for confirmation and will reply when I hear back.

One comment included the sentence:

can we ‘freeze’ the

I’m not sure if the apostrophe is a special character. Otherwise, all other text was normal characters and experienced the same issue. Thanks!

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Thanks @aesterling for the info. I’m having a hard time replicating but I’ve escalated this to our internal team for future testing and discovery.

9

seeing this as well.

clients pointed out before, but realized this was happening to us as well internally.

image
image323×146 8.26 KB

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Thanks @wfyteam for sending, I have flagged this to the team to look into this further.

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HI all, I received this from our team as a workaround for now:

to unblock commenting atm, an identified user can “end session” (see attached)

this should prompt them to identify again, and a new session cookie will be generated

*note: they wont be able to edit previously submitted comments outside of the new session (part of a new security fix)

CleanShot 2025-09-24 at 08.45.07@2x
CleanShot 2025-09-24 at 08.45.07@2x702×514 35.3 KB

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@wfyteam are you able to reproduce this consistently, or does it only happen occasionally?

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Thanks @CharlieAnderson, we’ll try this next time it occurs. Does your team have an idea about the cause of the problem so a fix can be implemented instead of the workaround?

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happens occasionally - ill try the fix above when I do