How to check edits (by an editor) before they are applied to a table?

Airtable has a built-in Activity Log that meticulously keeps track of every single change made to a record. It shows you both the before & after changes, along with who made the changes & when they made the changes. Just expand one of your records and open up the activity log on the right. It’s a pretty amazing & brilliant feature that most database platforms don’t have. You can learn more about it here:

Scott
The activity log is very interesting, thanks for the info!

but it seems like the edits have already been applied and it doesn’t allow me to rollback to a previous state before the edits. I am also not sure how this will allow me to find the records that were actually edited, when the total records is about 700 and edits maybe on around 10 to 50 records?

You can’t stop an edit from being made, unless you create your own system for that using other tools, such as external forms and external automation routines.

Regarding seeing the most recent edits, just add a Last Modified Time Field to your base, and sort by that field.

Thanks! I should have seen that Last Modified Time field!
I am kind of new using AT so I am still feeling my way around.

It would be nice if I found someone who already solved this issue with a form or external automation routine.

You could also just have them do their edits in another table, and then you could figure out some way to bring over their edits to the existing table. Again, you would need to create your own solution for this.

I was working on that idea before I made this post. Then I thought that possibly someone out there has an easy solution, so I posted it.

Maybe the easy fast solution does not exist, and I will go back to investigating using the second duplicate table idea? Thanks!

Were you able to come up with a solution? I would be very interested in hearing how you solved this problem!

Chris
Sorry to say that I never came up with a solution since the amount of time necessary to solve this problem, was way too much when compared to the number of edits needed to be done on a weekly basis. I ended up doing most of the edits myself.

I have something similar to this, although mine is more of letting other users Add banned persons into the Banned List through a Form, and they all go to a separate table Pending Approval Table where I can review if they should be added or not. If I approve, I mark the Approved checkbox of that entry then it’s added to my Banned Table using automations. I also use the “unchecked checkbox” filter to see only pending entries, and have an automation set up to email me when a user has requested to Add a banned person to the list.

I think for your scenario, you could somehow apply the same. A separate table (Edit Pending Approval table) to see what records have been edited. Add a button in your main table to “Edit” the entry where a form will pop up, enter only the details that need changing, then when submitted, it will add to the Edit Pending Approval table, where you can now review them before you let automations update your main table with the changes.

Hi!

I’ve got a similar situation and Googling led me here, though it doesn’t seem like there are any good solutions yet.

I’ve just imported a spreadsheet of video game recommendations for a Discord I’m in. What I’m hoping to do is allow members of this Discord to update the records on this sheet (e.g. adding more info about each game), but to have all updates approved by me before they go live, to avoid trolls.

I was previously using Google Sheets and used the Comment function for this. However, it got clunky really fast - I’d have to copy and paste each comment which was fiddly. I’ve seen a number of third party extensions that claim to do this (though not with the approval part) but they are either too pricey or no longer existing.

Does anyone have any other ideas on how to make this viable?

Will people be updating existing records, or only adding new records via a form? If they are only adding new records via a form, the easiest thing to do is add a checkbox to mark when you approve the content of that new record. Then only publish info from a view filtered to show only records with the checkbox checked.

They’d be editing existing records as well as adding new records.

You can have a last modified by field to show who last edited the record. Then only publish the records where you are the last editor. If everything is okay, you can do some token edit just to get you listed as the most recent editor. The problem with this method is that the information will disappear until you edit it (depending on your publishing workflow).

The main issue is that once an edit is made, the publishing method no longer can get the previous value from the Airtable base.

How are you publishing your data?

I’m just going to have the table open for display, nothing special. It’d be just like sharing the public link to a Google Sheet.