Oops! Editable shared view update

[Jordan_Scott1]

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.

[Jordan_Scott1]

Thank you for calling this out, super great point!!

[Julian_E_Post]

Databaser:

I had like a minimum of 2 hours on this. Even the always great GAP Consulting did a 14’ tutorial on the topic! This, in combo with the BuiltOnAir session, the many confirmative messages on LinkedIn, Twitter and the BuiltOnAir community, and we are labelled idiots for wanting to share this asap with our customers… :man_facepalming:

Wow! I guess I missed quite a lot. Starting to see the frustration more… that said, I also assume that whoever made this mistake did not do it on purpose! We’re all out here pushing Airtable to implement tons of new features that we want, and they’re making a lot of them happen. I’m really appreciative of that

[ScottWorld]

@Jordan_Scott1 This is a gigantic disappointment.

[Rebecca_Elam]

We have seen many of these “silly little missteps” in the past couple weeks. Emails that arent supposed to go off. $0 invoice emails for plans that were not $0 or not billed monthly. Telling us scripting was still free. Then telling us scripting would only be free for a month. Then saying oh sorry didn’t mean that it’s free again. These things are getting worse. Not better. They scaled too fast internally and are paying the price for it. Either that or didn’t scale in the right areas and have unsupported departments. Either way. A lot of us long time users are cringing like this sometimes on a daily basis. I promise you the reactions are not unfounded and this is not a new conversation. Not to mention this has been a DESPERATELY needed feature request for a very long time. So for us it was the big “FINALLY” and we all have egg on our face now. Now if Airtable had a flawless history of notifying us when new features were released at the time that they were released or even before for select groups of consultants then we might have thought it was odd that we hadn’t heard from airtable and just submitted big reports or asked private internal contacts, but that isn’t how it has been. Hence the outrage.

[Rebecca_Elam]

You actually got a plug on built on air this morning. Love your content. Long time fan. It also seems to me as a predominant airtable content creator you would also benefit from knowing about new features a little bit ahead of time which is ultimately what we are asking for. Communication. I hope you know I mean no malice or sarcasm by any of this. Just trying to explain our position.

[Hendrik_Yang]

Seriously disappointed. With all the funding, Airtable could have done better!

[SergioCodes]

My Twitter post :clown_face:

Follow me for more fake news :man_shrugging:

Best
Sergio

[Avark_Web]

Jordan_Scott1:

It’s top of mind for us to get the right solution out to all of you

The most requested feature and I didnt know they had it built all along. I thought I was dreaming when I saw it.

oh wells… I think “right solution” ment they’re thinking how to charge us for this feature. I think if they did enable it, users would not buy plan seats and use the public edit feature instead and CFO says no go. :smiling_face_with_tear: Its more of a “would this affect my revenue decision” rather than the “right solution for users”

[Julian_E_Post]

Thank you! I’m feeling a bit misinterpreted here. My comment above was in response to an extra spicy comment, which the poster later acknowledged was over-spicy. I felt (and still feel) defensive of Jordan, who is not the person who made this mistake, AND the poor person who actually did make this big mistake, who probably feels terrible about it! I have experience being in a super fast-growing business, and have made plenty of my own mistakes. It doesn’t mean they’re ok, but they happen. I’m also learning a lot from the posts on here, including yours, about how they’ve been affected by these issues :slightly_smiling_face:

[kuovonne]

Avark_Web:

I think “right solution” ment they’re thinking how to charge us for this feature

I am very sure that it is far more complex than deciding on a price. User permissions go far beyond this feature. User permissions touch on many, many aspects of Airtable, even aspects that most users are unaware of. Getting changes to user permissions is critical to being able to share interfaces, for example.

As far as pricing goes, this feature has been in beta for select enterprise customers for a while. It is likely that when it comes out of beta, it will be limited to enterprise customers. If you already are an enterprise customer, you can likely request access to the beta for no charge.

If you are not an enterprise customer, Airtable has no obligation to provide new features at any particular price point. Of course Airtable users would like to get new features for free. But Airtable is a business and they also need to make money.