Revision History

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Applies to:: MindTouch (current)
Role required:: Draft Contributor

Revision history allows you to manage page revisions, with the option to see what was revised, who made the revision, compare two revisions, and revert to another revision if necessary.

You can see Revision History for all content pages made from new page templates, and within template directory for pages such as header and footer templates.

When reverting to a previous revision, certain information such as changes to page content, page properties, files, and file properties can be reverted. To learn more about what information can and cannot be reverted, read our article on page element revert rules.

Consider when attachments are involved before reverting pages.

View, compare, and revert to a revision

From the Expert toolbar, select Options > Revision history.
The Revision History page shows when an edit occurred, who made the edit, and a summary of the edit, and any comments added in Edit Summary..
- To view what a particular revision looked like, select the revision and click the View this revisionicon .
- To view the changes that were made during a single session, select the revision and click the Compare with previous revisionicon .
- To revert to the revision, select the revision and click the Revert to this revision icon .

Compare two revisions

Select the revisions (A).
The date and the username of the person who edited the page are conveniently displayed in the top revision banner (B).
Click Compare revisions (C). This will open the "Revision comparison" window.

revision_compare

In the "Revision comparison" window:

Under View comparison, select the view that will help you best distinguish the changes:

Combined view: View the changes that have been made in both revisions in one window (A).
Side by side view: View the changes that have been made in both revisions separately (B).
Both views: View the changes in one window and side by side.

Too many changes in Revision summary

Sometimes when comparing revisions, you might see a Revision summary that says "Too many changes."

This message appears when:

Major content restructuring has occurred between revisions.
Large amounts of content were added or removed.
Many small changes were made throughout the document.

"Too many changes" in the Revision Summary in Revision History.

For technical reasons, Expert limits the number of differences it will process to 25,000 operations. Expert analyzes the entire page contents before and after the page update and compares the operations. Each operation represents a change to an HTML element, attribute, or text content. For example, changing a paragraph's text counts as one operation, while adding a new table with multiple rows would count as many operations.

This limit has three main functions:

Ensure the system remains responsive.
Prevent excessive server resource usage.
Protect against browser performance issues when calculating large differences.

For very large pages, even a small change can result in the "Too many changes" message because the large page before is being compared to the large page after.