Request and answer change history

Two questions come up about requests more than any others. "Who changed this?", when a request that asked for a certificate number is now asking for an upload and nobody remembers doing it. And the worse one, "this answer used to say something else", when a license number is not the one you wrote down last month.

There are two separate trails, one for each, and they are separate on purpose. Admin history covers the request. The trail under an answer covers what came back.

The distinction worth holding on to

The request is what you asked: the label, the wording, whether it is required, whether it needs an expiry date, the document you attached. Changing it changes the ask for everyone on the portal.

The answers are what came back: one per person, submitted from their own link.

Admin history is the history of the ask, and it never touches the answers. That is why the button says "Admin history" rather than "History".

Admin history: what changed about the ask

Open Portals, open the portal, expand the Requests panel, and expand the request you are asking about. Admin history sits at the foot of the expanded row, under everything that edits it, because it is a reference rather than a control.

It opens a read-only list, newest first. Each entry gives you three things: who made the change, when, and what actually moved, written as the old value struck through with the new one beside it. A value that was added shows only the new one, marked added; a value that was cleared shows only the old one, struck through and marked removed.

The oldest entry reads Created as, with the label the request started life under, so the start of the list is not mistaken for an edit.

What it tracks. Everything on the request's own definition: the label, the description, the choices on a choice request, the attached document, and the settings beside them. Required, expiry date, archived, long answer, multiple choices, the answer format on a text request, whether a document shows in place, whether a signature or a typed name is required on terms, the minimum and maximum, the contact field an answer writes through to, the terms template, whether the request is limited to specific people, and whether a conditional section needs all or any of its conditions met.

Replacing the attached document with a file of the same name still shows up: the entry reads the file name, then the same name marked (new file).

What it does not track, and where those live instead. Answers and uploads are not here, because they are not part of the ask; they are under View on the same row. Neither are the answer conditions that gate a request, the list of named people a conditional section is limited to, or the individual steps inside a checklist. Those are stored separately and are not versioned. Editing one of them still touches the request, so it produces an entry with nothing visible in it, and those are dropped rather than shown as a change nobody can read.

Where a name is missing. An entry can say "No name recorded" instead of naming somebody. That means one of three things: the change predates the point where we started recording who made it, it was made by something running unattended rather than by a person, or it was made by a colleague whose access has since been removed. It never quietly names the account owner as a stand-in.

Two different reasons the list can stop short, and the modal tells you which. "Showing the most recent 200 changes" is a display cap, and the rest are still there. "Older changes are not shown. History is kept for six months" is retention, and they are not.

The trail under an answer

This one lives where the answers do. On the same request row, open View.

Any answer that has held more than one value carries a small Changed once or Changed 3 times line underneath it. Open it and you get every value that answer used to hold, each struck through, each with what happened to it and when:

• Replaced. They submitted a new value over the top of the old one.
• Removed by the person, using whichever word your account uses for the people you onboard. They withdrew their own answer from their link.
• Removed by a name. Somebody on your account deleted it. This is the answer to most "why did this change" questions, which is why it names who rather than leaving it at "removed".

Each line also carries the date the old value was originally submitted, in brackets after the date it stopped being current. That is there so you can tell how long a wrong value stood: "wrong all along" and "wrong since Tuesday" are different problems.

A terms acceptance that was signed again reads Re-signed instead, with the version they accepted, the name they typed and their signature, because the earlier agreement is a record to keep, not a value that was wrong.

Everything in the trail is something the person deliberately sent. Their page only records a value when they submit it, so nothing here is a half-finished draft they were still typing.

An answer that was removed outright has no live row to sit under. Those get their own Removed answers group at the foot of the View list, one per person, already open, since there is no current value above them to expand from.

Which document they answered against. When a request carries a document (a policy to read, a form to check), each answer notes Answered against that file and its upload date. If you replace the document afterwards, answers given against the old one carry an Answered before the document was replaced badge, so you can see who needs to look at the new version.

Answer history is kept for six months, the same as the request's.

Which history am I looking at?

Three screens here have "history" in them and they cut the same data three ways.

• Admin history, on the request row, is one request on one portal: how the ask itself has changed.
• The trail under an answer, behind View, is one person's answer to one request: what it used to say.
• Contact request history is one person across every portal: everything you have ever asked them and what came back.

"What did we ask?" is the first. "Why is this number different?" is the second. "What has this contractor ever sent us?" is the third.

Getting help

If a record does not look right, or you need to establish what somebody submitted beyond what these two trails show, email [email protected] with the portal and the person's name.