See users viewing document

[yohanboniface]

Hey hey,

Me again :)

Sometimes it could be useful to see who else if viewing the document:

• for example, when we are changing the structure of a document for someone else, it could be useful to do it when we see nobody is active on it
• or when we are doing work on a document of someone else, it could be useful for them to know who is touching their data

I'm thinking about something similar to what G…gle does:

No need for a first step to point which table or which cell is selected or such advanced feature, imho.

What do you think ? :)

Thanks,

Yohan

[paulfitz]

This would definitely be very useful. And both the server side and the client side code needed seem well within reach.

One nuance is how much information to reveal to different categories of user, for example how much should an anonymous visitor to a public document get to see about logged-in users viewing the same document. But there seem reasonable answers to such questions and a lot of precedent from existing products.

[anaisconce]

We actually have a very preliminary design for this!

The idea was to show some avatars, and when there are too many, collapse them into a number that can be clicked on to expand a list. Some details haven't been fully worked out, this was more exploratory.

One idea was that anonymous users don't see who is on the doc. Only users privately added to the doc can see who is on the doc, and see a count of anon. But there's more details to work out.

Accompanying this is the idea to show cursor position. One of the avatars in the list view is surrounded by purple. If she's working in a cell, there will be a matching purple border around the cell. Again, more details to work out here. Does user cursor presence lock the cell for editing or not? I would be inclined towards no since people may leave a cursor in a cell without realizing it and leave the doc open in a tab! But there may be other arguments.

[lusebille]

I don't know in this ticket is still valide but I made a proposal (based on what is suggested above but suggesting small changes / specifications ) https://www.figma.com/design/wcpetFt6aOKzTszcvPPWLQ/%5B05%2F24%5D-Grist-Design?node-id=303-17197&t=9hvbpy8Fg7eoAurj-1

[vviers]

@dsagal @paulfitz does Grist Labs plan on developing this ? It's not very high on our todo list for the summer

[dsagal]

We'd love this feature, but don't have the bandwidth, so it's not in our list of planned work for the summer either.

The issue was closed unintentionally (by some automation?) -- I am reopening.