Erase history of modifications without Make a copy

sakudo

Hi there, thanks for the great software. We just used it in the partents' community of a school to exchange tickets for a concert that was sold out.
I am the owner of the document on a registered account and now I want to clear its history as it contains a lot of personal data. I have managed to clear the history through the properties dialogue (described here). The "delete history" button has vanished and the file size has descreased as expected, but the history is still accessible.
Am I overlooking anything or is it a bug?

Mathilde

Hello,

Thanks for your interest in CryptPad!

Have you been able to look at our History functionality documentation? It explains what this is, how this works, etc: https://docs.cryptpad.org/en/user_guide/apps/general.html#document-history

I believe in your case, if you want to erase the history of edits made to the document you should instead use the Make a copy functionality: https://docs.cryptpad.org/en/user_guide/apps/general.html#make-a-copy

Hope this helps!

sakudo

Yes, I have looked at the documentation, and it says "To save storage space, history can be deleted in the document’s properties".
That's what I have done. The size has shrunk, the button "delete history" has vanished, but the history is still accessible. Strange.
Ideally, I do not want to use the "copy functionality" as it would alter the document link, and we would like to keep the current link.

Mathilde

Hello,

Thank you for your answer. Sadly it's not possible at that time. We have however your use case in mind but haven't been able to secure any funding to work on implementing such a feature at this time.

sakudo

Oh, that is surprising as the feature looks like implemented, see "delete history" at the bottom of the properties dialogue:
Image description
Taken from https://docs.cryptpad.org/en/user_guide/apps/general.html#document-properties
Or are we having a misunderstanding?

Mathilde

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I see now that my responses were a bit misleading, as our History functionality is!

To make it simple currently erasing the history just "compact" it, keeping only specific checkpoints but still allows you to browse it. The history of the document isn't entirely deleted but "shrank" into fewer chunks.

Hence the mention of the Make a copy functionality, that completely erase it. We'll probably need to rework the phrasing around this functionality in the future.

sakudo

Ah, now, I understand! Thank you for the clarification.
May be you can merely relabel the red button to "simplify history" or "compact history". This would prevent the misunderstanding.
It would be very helpful to have an actual "delete history" button (or "purge history"). I am a total noob in programing, hence I cannot contribute. I am sorry! The deletion might even be easier to implement than the simplification.
The "delete history" would be equivalent to "make a copy" but with the advantage that the link to the document is kept unchanged.

(I am interested in this feature as we used a shared document to exchange tickets for a concert in high demand within a schools' community. So people left phone numbers and email addresses in the document, and now this data is still hidden in the history. We have only shared the "/embed" link, so people do not see the history (unless they remove the "/embed", but that is "data privacy" through "obscurity" :-) ) Now, after the event, it would be nice to clear the data and have a clean start for the next concert.)

Thanks for the great tool!

Mathilde

Thanks for your response!

Regarding the history we were thinking about renaming it "Trimming".

Apropos of your use case, maybe a Form document would have been more appropriate for preserving the privacy of the participants?