Simultaneous editing by two different users?
Asked by Twan Vollebregt:

We are noticing that:

a) it is possible for two or more people to edit a card description at the same time (i.e. there is no 'locking' mechanism)

b) when the first person clicks Save, the other(s) loose their edits and the card refreshes to the saved state.

This is obviously a right royal pain, but it also seems to break all multi-user rules for decent software. So maybe we are doing something totally wrong here.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks!


Answers:
author: CVM
body: Has this issue from over two years ago been addressed? We use the description portion on cards for great detail at times and our staff gets frustrated when entering a ton of info only to find out it gets wiped out because another member in our staff had the same card open and came back to it to hit save - effectively wiping out all of the work the initial member entered.

We contemplated abandoning Trello for this very reason. Trello should at least have a pop up warning that someone else entered info and that hitting save could potentially wipe out their data.


author: Tomasz C
body: OMG! We just realized about this the hard way.

In my opinion it is a disqualification for multi user web app.


author: Lindsay Carter
body: Is there any updated answer on this from 2 years ago? We are experiencing the same issue as a team and are losing hours of work time from items being deleted. Will someone please address if there is a solution or how to handle this?


author: Christian Nakic
body: Hi there, we are working with Jira and have the same problem. When editing a description in the Jira cards, the user get's no information, that a card description is already edited by another user. Has this issue from 2020 been addressed?

In my opinion it is a necessary requirement to indicate to the user that a card is currently being edited by another user.


author: Clare Suereth
body: I'd like to hear an update on this if there is one. Thanks.


author: Aimee Hicks
body: We are experiencing the same issue and are looking for a workaround if there is one. This is especially troublesome as we have moved to using Trello cards for our weekly team meeting agendas which our entire team has access to record input. We've recently discovered that some users have inadvertently been overwriting each other's contributions due to this system issue. We may have to revert to our previous process if Trello can't offer a solution.


author: Twan Vollebregt
body: It is actually worse than described. Many times, Trello does not auto-update the card state (particularly when you resume a laptop from sleep state in the morning). So user 1 will make changes to a card, and user 2's view of that card is not updated in the browser. User 2 then makes a small change (to their version of the card's state), saves it, and bingo - all of user 1's changes are lost.

There is a way to revert the card to an earlier state - a Chrome plugin called "Trello card history". This allows you to decide if you prefer to loose the last set of changes in favour of retaining older changes - particularly useful for when the above situation happens.


author: Ryan
body: Hi there,

Thanks for writing in about this.

I agree that this isn't the best way that this could work, so I've passed this on to our product team to try to find a better way for this to work. It's a bit early to say what this solution might look like or when this will be rolled out, but hopefully we will see improvements here.

Really appreciate that you took the time to write about this!

comments: author: Twan Vollebregt
body: Hi Ryan, thanks for your honest reply. It is a little surprising that the core functionality of Trello (entering text on the card) is not set up to deal with multiple simultaneous users, so we hope that an improvement is developed and rolled out soon. Currently we are randomly losing edits but learning to do regular Save actions :-) .

One more request: It is somewhat unclear how the Save function differs from clicking outside the description area (which also closes the edit mode). From trial-and-error it looks like clicking-outside will usually hold the edits, but occasionally we notice that the edits will be lost at a later stage - it is not clear if this is also related to another person doing an edit (and Save) for that card (but on many occasions the edits were lost despite near-certainty that no other user was editing subsequently). There needs to be some strict and clearly flagged action to avoid random loss of edits, and we would appreciate you tightening this up.

Thanks!


author: Twan Vollebregt
body: No-one? I am guessing that many Trello users are in a multi-user situation, so simultaneous editing must be taking place a lot... Any insights appreciated.