We should prevent revision messages on any entity when there wasn't actually a change/diff

[agilliland]

Specifically thinking about cases where this happens ...

Off the top of my head a couple possibilities:

• we could prevent the revision from ever getting saved in the first place. this could be done on the backend and/or on the frontend by stopping save actions that don't modify anything.
• we can also simply keep these revisions but filter them out of the listing on the frontend. this feels a little icky to me though because part of the value of the revision log is it shows you a history of what happened, so this approach is akin to filtering out history 😱

[kdoh]

I'm trying to think of instance where it'd be valuable to know that a user interacted with a question but never did anything. It certainly doesn't fit the notion of a "revision history" (hence the issue) but before we stop saving those moments entirely I'd be curious to think through whether we think they could be valuable in some way, thought to be honest I'm hard pressed at this moment to think of how.

[mazameli]

Another possible pattern to use is keeping the Save Changes button disabled until an actual change is made. It might feel a little squirrely if you make a change and then manually undo it, though, because then the button would go from disabled to enabled and then back to disabled. But I've seen this pattern used on settings/edit screens in a number of places.

[gusaiani]

In a quick exploration, I:

1. created a Dashboard
2. added a textbox with some text
3. saved Dashboard
4. edited Dashboard, changing text inside textbox
5. saved Dashboard
6. refreshed page
7. clicked on ellipsis icon (top, right)
8. clicked on "Revision history" in the dropdown menu

Popup shows list, bottom to top:

1. First revision.
2. added a card.
3. rearranged the cards.
4. row empty of What

So here we can see the opposite situation of what we're going for: there was a change inside the textbox and the revision "What" is empty.

Any suggestion here?

———

Other minor things:

1. sentence-casing inconsistency: "First revision." is sentence-cased, rest of messages starts lower-cased.
2. "rearranged the cards" probably should not exist as I did not do that