Improved version history & view changes since last visit

[juliusknorr]

• Version history shows individual changes per version
• Bubble to indicate changes: What changed since last visit -> opens versions in the sidebar and shows them

[jancborchardt]

@juliushaertl for the mockups it would be helpful to know what can get extracted. I assume it would be something like "Julius changed section 2. Heading etc etc" or "Nimisha added Filename.png in sectionname"?

@nextcloud/designers who is interested in looking into this? It would be 2 parts as Julius mentions above:

• Improvement of the version history view with the described short summaries.
• A toast or button (on top right or bottom right for example) which says "Changes since your last visit" if there were any changes, which opens the versions sidebar. I remember this from desktop Microsoft Word somewhere but unfortunately didnt take a screenshot

[juliusknorr]

The technical options what we can extract may depend on the document type, let me try to summarize what we already know:

Markdown

• We can generate a HTML diff with red/green highlight on what was added or removed between two versions (probably too technical)
• We can group certain changes and try to categorize them in a structured format, so we could be flexible about how to render them, not final but what should work but would need some consideration how granular this should get (e.g. per character, word, paragraph, list item)
  • Possible structured data a change can contain, while a version consists of 1 or more of those changes:
  • change user (author of the version)
  • node added
  • node removed
  • node changed
  • type of node
  • content before
  • content after
  • Possible to generate a diff just for the text content
  • parent node tree (e.g. under heading h2 with heading text, under heading h1 with heading text)
  • What I'm not sure yet how well this would work is categorizing marks (e.g. bold, italic, ...) especially as showing all the differences there could be too detailed. Maybe those should just be considered a full block change then and summarized

So some example I could imagine would be

• Added a new image under "My heading" -> show the image preview?
• Changed a paragraph under "My sub heading" -> how to display what changed in there?
• Deleted a table -> show the table that was removed?
• Added a list entry to the list in the "My other heading" section -> Show the new entry?
• Changed 6 list entries -> show the new list entries?

Office

To be clarified, but I imagine we could get a similar structure there

[nimishavijay]

I can pick this up. Questions from my side:

• [ ] how often are the versions saved?
• [ ] how this is reflected for collaborative editing (Julius and Jan updated a list in "Activities and schedule", Jan added a paragraph in "How to find the office", and Marco removed a table in "Things to remember" would be possible? or Julius, Jan and Marco changed "Activities and schedule", "How to find the office", and "Things to remember")
• [ ] Will the changes be reflected in the "Compare to current version" side by side view as well?

For reference here is how Notion does it, very detailed

and Gdocs

[juliusknorr]

how often are the versions saved?

On every save of the file, but they are cleaned up afterwards, unless you give them a name to make them persistent:

The versioning app expires old versions automatically to make sure that the user doesn’t run out of space. This pattern is used to delete old versions:

For the first second we keep one version
For the first 10 seconds Nextcloud keeps one version every 2 seconds
For the first minute Nextcloud keeps one version every 10 seconds
For the first hour Nextcloud keeps one version every minute
For the first 24 hours Nextcloud keeps one version every hour
For the first 30 days Nextcloud keeps one version every day
After the first 30 days Nextcloud keeps one version every week

how this is reflected for collaborative editing (Julius and Jan updated a list in "Activities and schedule", Jan added a paragraph in "How to find the office", and Marco removed a table in "Things to remember" would be possible? or Julius, Jan and Marco changed "Activities and schedule", "How to find the office", and "Things to remember")

It does not at all. Currently versions only have one author (the person that saved the file). What might be feasible is to at least list multiple users as the author, but tracking back who did what is out of range for now.

We also talked about this briefly in the planning meeting that this is rather out of scope and we just focus on the changes for now.

Will the changes be reflected in the "Compare to current version" side by side view as well?

I think that would be a separate topic on how to bring inline change indication to the side by side view, for now I'd limit the scope to just the diff in the versions.

[juliusknorr]

Just to have it mentioned, there has been the idea to experiment with AI to summarize the changes, but first attempts didn't bring any valuable results, so while out of scope the structured changes can be a baseline for any future AI work as well.

[max-nextcloud]

Just discussed this briefly with @juliushaertl during our one on one. It might be a good starting point to look at actual changes in say the company handbook to get an idea of what we might want to display.

I'm still not clear what we are aiming for. A diff of html files is quite well defined. You can generate one here: https://php-htmldiff.caxy.com/

But if we want to provide context and leave out unchanged parts etc it becomes kind of vague for me.

So I propose to start from one or two actual document changes and try and come up with what a good presentation of those changes would look like.

It can be hard to contextualize based on headings because people just use them for all kinds of stuff and in arbitrary order. So if we want to use headings for context we also need to figure out what to do with that.

Real world use of headings

### Monday Today I went to the movies # :scream: That was sooo scary! What's the context of this sentence now? ### Tuesday Not sure what I'll do today.

[nimishavijay]

What it can look like:

In the sidebar:

• [ ] The size of the thumbnails is reduced to 32x32px since there is now a lot of text information
• [ ] Named versions, current and initial versions are in bold
• [ ] For other versions, show:
  • [ ] name of author
  • [ ] If multiple authors, show [Name of author] and others if possible
  • [ ] time of version (in the mockup it is shown in the longer form 1 day ago, if there is a way we could shorten it even more and show it in the top right corner like in Mail)
  • [ ] In the subline, show the sections that were changed
  • [ ] An expand/collapse toggle that shows or hides the detailed view
• [ ] Detailed changes:
  • [ ] An icon on the left showing if something was added, removed or changed (alternatives: show using colors, green/red/yellow --> looks very colorful and maybe not suitable for colorblind people blue/grey --> not obvious enough that it is added and removed)
  • [ ] Show each change in one line, with an indication of what kind of change using a small icon (Eg. H3 icon, image icon, bullet point, etc)
  • [ ] Don't show icon for paragraph, instead show 2 lines of changes instead of one
  • [ ] Subline with the section name
  • [ ] Limit to 5 most recent changes, with a "See all changes" button which opens the that version in the editor

Editor:

• [ ] Show an indication that we are viewing an older version,
• [ ] Show a 3 dot menu containing the version actions on the top right
• [ ] TBD: how to show changes in the editor (icons makes the document look messy if many things were added, colors are either not colorblind-friendly or interfere with formatting in the document, any thoughts here @nextcloud/designers ?)

What do you think? :)