Document collaboration *without* versioning?

July 20, 2024 9:38 AM

I need to find a collaborative document editing platform that does *not* save versions of every change, or at least has an option to stop versioning. Do you know of one?

I have looked at Google Docs and MS OneDrive and they both have mandatory versioning (i.e., nearly every change is saved as a separate change history). There is no way to turn off versioning on those platforms. It seems that Dropbox is the same. is there any dumb-old-days option out there that is simply a single file that can be accessed by multiple authors and saves over itself each time?

posted by Mid to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

This seems at odds with the idea of working on a document collaboratively. Can you elaborate on the use case? Why is it important that older versions are unavailable?

(Internally, it seems likely that the server will need to keep track of multiple versions, since the last person to upload a new version (call it N) may have used a less recent version (call it N - 2) as their starting point. To integrate the changes, you need some kind of version history; otherwise you would lose the edits from the previous version (N - 1).)
posted by demi-octopus at 10:25 AM on July 20 [2 favorites]

I'm not totally familiar with Butter Docs, but it might enable team changes without creating a new version each time. However, there is an option to create a Snapshot, and an option to Revert, in case that's too close to versioning.
posted by cocoagirl at 10:27 AM on July 20

Response by poster: It is better for my use case if there is not a trail of who made what change.
posted by Mid at 10:32 AM on July 20

If effectively wiping the history every night or something like that would be good enough, then you could write a very short Google Apps Script that would make a copy of the document in the same folder (the copy won't have the edit history) and then delete the older copy (skipping the trash). Might be a bit annoying if someone is editing a document when it is deleted, but if there's a time that everyone is likely asleep, this kind of workaround might work for you. You also couldn't share a link to a specific document directly and would have to link to the folder.
posted by ssg at 11:05 AM on July 20 [1 favorite]

How resistant does your method need to be against someone who wants to understand who did a specific edit? One idea that occurs is to have everyone sign into the same account to edit these documents. For instance, on google docs, it is only easy to view the google account name associated with each change, but behind the scenes other data like IP address might be logged.

Second I notice that etherpad(-lite) can be configured to not require sign-in and has a simple button to "clear authorship colors". Again, it's not clear from this surface view how much information is retained behind the scenes. It's browser-based and there are public instances that are easy to try if you want to see how the UI works.

cryptpad has an encrypted security model that might or might not be another way to further your goals. I didn't try it.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 11:21 AM on July 20 [1 favorite]

SharePoint has the possibility to turn versioning on or off for each document library.
posted by cantthinkofagoodname at 11:22 AM on July 20

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking as I don't do colloborative writing, but I am a paid Butterdocs user and can tell you there is an on/off switch for tracking changes.

I believe each writer will have to enable/disable it on their own screens. When it's off, it's off for that writer. When it's on, that writer has the ability to track changes by writer or by revision.

The document's creator also has the ability to "turn it off for everyone".

Keep in mind I've not tested any of this as I am only one user and only have one license.

They are pretty quick at answering support questions, though, so maybe shoot them an email.
posted by dobbs at 12:58 PM on July 20

Confluence. It does save version history in the background, but it's easily ignored or you can even delete the history.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 1:27 AM on July 21