have a way to turn off server autosave?

[hamilton]

There are cases where a user may want to simply play with their own notebook without committing the changes. I think that is a user story, but I'm not sure what the matching functionality looks like.

Code and UX wise, perhaps this would be one small bit of state to add to the store, one additional menu item, and one quick check in the polling function too prevent any autosaving.

[bcolloran]

i think the user story that we should aim for around this is actually more like: "make sure users have a way of easily reverting to any version of a notebook (and without clobbering current work)".

this broader story could be broken down into a few smaller items:

• enable a "revert to previous version" button in the version history pane
• add some concept of previousVersion to our document data model so that if you revert to a previous version, autosaves branch off from that point in the revision history and can be grouped by revision branch
• create a visual tree diagram that represents this flow and use that in place of the current revision list

[wlach]

Code and UX wise, perhaps this would be one small bit of state to add to the store, one additional menu item, and one quick check in the polling function too prevent any autosaving.

I think the user story is an important one, but I don't think we should expose a modal setting like this in the UI, as it's bound to confuse people. Maybe if the user is looking at an older revision of a notebook, we could just turn off autosave, but give the user an option to:

1. Save the revision to a new notebook
2. Overwrite the existing notebook

In the revision viewer, we could provide the above two options which would perform the operation directly (along with a "view" setting to open a particular revision without committing to the above operations).

[hamilton]

I think there are other use-cases here other than revisions, but perhaps another solution can answer the user story I'm interested in. This is a problem I have had re: autosave. I encourage y'all to let the idea marinade in the refrigerators of your minds. I'm not convinced that if it is a modal thing is bound to cause confusion if we make it clear you've disabled autosave in the header message, along with a single click to "re-enable autosaving" or something like that. Open to other solutions to this problem, or we can just leave this open and see if it feels more like a pain point down the line / fades away.