I have a love hate relationship with the built-in user task comments. I love that you can now show or hide them using field rules and that they show in the Action History of the Details pane in Forms. I hate that I can't make them conditionally required based on other conditions from the form or based on what Action Button was selected.

As I continue to try and use the built-in features more and more, I found another way the user task comments could be improved. Using gateways or workflows we may send a Forms instance back to the step it just came from based on some condition. It would be great if we were able to add a comment from the gateway or workflow that would show in the Action History.

This would allow a user to see everything in one place. Currently we write a value to a variable with an error message or something similar to show the end user, but that doesn't get added to the history if it is saved with the document or emailed to someone. It can cause some confusion when someone goes back to look and determine why it happened.