[✔️DONE] Admin activity history/audit log

I’d like to request the addition of some kind of Admin-specific (i.e. changes to fields, types, and relationships) log or history view.

I’ve just started sharing admin duties on a workspace with someone who is fairly new to Fibery. I did a lot of things for him at first, but the best way for him to learn is by doing. However sometimes he does nonsensical things and I want at least the ability to see what edits he made to which Types, Views, etc. There are too many to just “know” or notice which ones were changed.

The ability to see and even revert changes would be super nice, but just a log of what was done seems important for long-term collaborative workspace management. And if you think about the future, when perhaps regular users can edit their own workspaces, a log that included those actions could also help admins assist and manage those user actions, potentially.

And to be clear, I’m talking about a single view where all such admin-level actions can be seen all together, and clickable to go to the changed Type/App. This differs I think from this existing request (which also does not focus specifically on admin-level actions):
View Change History

This may be very similar/related to a couple other requests already here:

[APPROVED] Activity Stream
Where the admin activities could perhaps be a “mode” (e.g. “admin activities” tab) or a toggle on the activity stream.

And:

Ability for admins to make notes when building Apps, or App Activity stream
Where these notes should be included in the history stream view.

My main experience with such admin/audit logs is actually in forums, not Discourse specifically, but in Simple Machines Forum the Admin log can be tremendously useful. Something to consider!

Hi, Oshyan!
In Q1 2020 we plan to add an Activity log. We don’t have an approved specification yet, so I’ve added your cool idea to this area and we will try to support your case (that totally makes sense!)

Many thanks for the detailed description

Excellent! Thank you for the quick and positive response.

(btw, I think you mean Q1 2021 )

Hi!
Glad to say, Activity Log is on board

Here you can check more details
Hi!

Activity Log is on board

The new Activity View on Entities is very nice to have, indeed! However it does not quite actually meet my original request above, as-intended. I’ll explain/elaborate:

The situation I was referring to was where I had a new administrator-level collaborator, and he was making changes such as creating, deleting, or reconfiguring Views, or changing Fields in a Type. These kinds of changes should, in my opinion, be visible in some kind of centralized “Administration Log”. You could also have them on each changed Type/View/etc., but some changes simply won’t easily be accessible or intuitive that way. A single place to see all admin changes that were made and by whom is what this request is about. So I hope you’ll re-open this and consider it for the future.

Edit: thanks for putting this back in dev for now.

Wanted to just add to this excellent request (and unfortunately poorly supported as it appears just I have upvoted it ) a comment I made in another thread re: and add on functionality that I think would be very useful to growing teams: The ability to leave comments when you make changes to a Type or App:

This would save the need to make these notes elsewhere in one’s personal wiki outside Fibery.

Another reason for this request is the fact that I think to get the real benefit of Fibery, a team will be treating it as living software that is always updated. This is true of most nocode such as Coda, Notion, etc. In these nocode tools and Fibery, unlike say an Asana or other simpler, limited tools, you can really get into a mess if you are not careful about your schemas, structures, formulas, etc. And like with all software, if you start to build and don’t document, you can get in trouble. In fact, in some cases I have seen almost borderline “Fibery Technical Debt” result from old relations I haven’t deleted, etc.!

Thanks guys and of course, although this commenting feature I’m talking about is way off the radar right now, would love to hear if you @Oshyan and fellow Master Poster @Chr1sG would find benefit with this!

Cheers!

Yes, this would certainly be nice to have. This is the kind of thing that seems like it’s going to be more useful/important with time, both because of the size of the system increasing, and because of the likelihood of onboarding new people. Actually it would also be useful at the very beginning of learning Fibery, to make notes as you experiment.

I might think of it a bit like the change comments (optional) that you can do with many Wiki systems. You make a change to a Wiki page and you can (optionally) write a brief summary of your change or the reason for it. Obviously I wouldn’t want to increase friction, and it shouldn’t be for every change to an entity (the existing Comment functionality mostly addresses the need for explaining regular Entity changes, I think). But for Type and App-level adjustments, an ability to link a comment/note to a change/activity would be nice.

Haha, so true. I use Airtable as well as fibery, and I often have to create rollups, lookups or formulas to achieve what I want. Sometimes I figure out a different / better way of doing something, but I’m paranoid about deleting old fields, because I’m not 100% sure that the field is actually redundant!
I fear that if I’m not careful, the same will soon happen with fibery.

…and @Oshyan, well said both - as usual! And I appreciate the chime in, particularly as I think you both are active and building and using Fibery for many months now, so I was hoping this particular point would be one you could relate to.

Some good ideas here I hope the team will consider and implement soon. And importantly, I hope this leaves a good trail for the rest of the community to come in and support if they have the need!