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Oops! Editable shared view update

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Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

Hi all -

I hope your week is going well. As you may have noticed this morning, editable shared views was accidentally enabled for all Airtable users and has since been rolled back.

First, I would like to apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused and acknowledge that we know this is a feature that the community is excited about. It has been great to watch people become experts in 30 minutes to share with the community and see all the excitement on Twitter. We know how upsetting it may be that this was accidentally enabled and we want to share some insights into what happened with all of you.

We know that collaboration in Airtable is top of mind for many of you (us too!), and the editable shared view feature is one of the many ways we’ve explored making that experience more impactful. However, we’re not currently prioritizing the development of this feature and are instead focusing on solving this problem in a more comprehensive way.

As Peter mentioned during Table Talk last month, we are planning to do a holistic revamp of permissions and updates to sharing in Airtable and do believe that there’s work to do to make collaboration in Airtable easier, more secure, and more scalable. We want to ensure we are delivering the best possible solution to you to solve this problem and have a team actively working on solutions that we hope to be able to share later this year.

We also recognize that many of you have ideas about changes you’d like to make to Airtable’s collaboration experience. We’d love to hear those ideas in the thread and why they’d be impactful for you. We’ll be taking that feedback, along with everything you’ve shared related to this problem in the Community in the past to help guide our future thinking.

Thank you for your understanding, we really appreciate it and apologize again for any confusion.

55 Comments
kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Welcome to the Airtable community! It seems like you joined this community just now in order to post to this thread. Would you mind posting an introduction?

I hope that Jordan knows that I wish her the best and do not expect immediate answers. In her post, she invited people to post their ideas “in the thread” and I replied with that in mind. Do you feel that my questions/comments were invalid or better suited to a different venue? If so, please clarify.

Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

@Databaser totally hear you and you have every right to be upset, I apologize that we put you in a difficult position with your clients, that’s the last thing anyone wanted.

In terms of the excitement around the feature, I do love the enthusiasm, and while the outcome isn’t what we wanted, I want to make sure we are elevating things that are exciting to all of you and it showcases how amazing the Airtable community is. I appreciate what you all create very much and it was encouraging to see, but I do apologize again for the outcome.

Ben_Young1
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

In short, this one really hurts.

I can’t express the amount of excitement that my users expressed about this update.
Many of my users have been hesitant to commit to adopting the platform entirely.

I have put in a lot of work to craft solutions and demonstrate the integrity of Airtable as a sustainable and scalable solution to them. In four hours, my users and organization went from being incredibly excited to being remarkably disappointed.


On top of this particular occurrence, the communication between Airtable and the broader community about changes, new features, and the platform overall deserves a more comprehensive discussion about best practices and norms.

Any sort of heads-up would be exponentially better than being ambushed.
Nothing is worse than waking up at 6:00 AM, launching Airtable, and realizing that an update has come out of nowhere that tweaks core functionality or how everything looks.

I then have two hours before banks open to brace for the sudden influx of support tickets and frantic questions about changes before team standups. All of that is on top of having to learn everything that changed with the new deployment.

Just talk to us.
We’ll talk back.

Rebecca_Elam
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

Y’all are seriously about to lose all your consultants and developers. Love you Jordan. As usual not at you and not your fault and I’m sorry you’re the one who has to take the **** for it. But this is bad.

Jacob
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Honestly just giving you a hard time with the number of questions in a single reply, which is why I followed up with the ‘lol’

IMO, asking 5 questions in a single reply is difficult to respond to, but you’re more than welcome to ask as many as you like!

Databaser
12 - Earth
12 - Earth

Of course she is, as Kuovonne is one of the most respected and contributing members of this and other Airtable communities.

Jacob
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

But yes, totally joined this community purely for the craziness in this thread lol (but longtime lurker)

And managed to snag the @jacob handle, which is pretty fun tbh!

Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

Thank you for this response, I appreciate it. Changing the way we announce product changes is something a small group and I are actively working on so hopefully you’ll see improvements soon.

In terms of your other questions, we are honestly still figuring that out, but I will respond as soon as I have a solid answer for you!

Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

Appreciate you and I’m sorry if we added any disappointment to your day. It’s top of mind for us to get the right solution out to all of you as quickly as we can!

Kamille_Parks
16 - Uranus
16 - Uranus

My response is best summarized by a Jim Halpert/Ben Wyatt-style glance at the camera in bewilderment.