Read Only / Lock Nest#64

For training/demonstration purposes it would be nice to have a setting on nests where a user can see everything in a nest, but can’t extract, tag, include, exclude, or effectively change anything in it. People oftentimes want to follow along in a training, but I’m wary of them starting to click things or accidentally making changes.

Read-only mode is an oft-requested feature, and we unfortunately aren’t giving it much priority because:

• Read-only is painstakingly difficult to implement and easily (accidentally) broken by developers as new features are added. Not that it couldn’t be done, but there’s a high developer-time cost, both in intial dev and maintainence.
• Nest copy is a generally viable alternative to RO; instead of creating a read-only fortress, you create a “do whatever” sandbox.
• We suspect that the “read only AutoLit” audience overlaps with the Synthesis audience; we want Synthesis to be the public export/sharing page. If something in AutoLit is of value for sharing, and it isn’t in Synthesis, we need to add it, not necessarily make AutoLit a half-public (read-only) tool.
  • (this isn’t the case for you, but I’m listing for completeness)

So, given that I’m effectively telling you you have to use copy, does it not satisfy your use case? In what ways would RO be better?

We took the “demo” nest approach for training; I’ll keep an eye open to see if anyone else requests Read Only / Lock Nests for other purposes!

Archiving, but always OK to reopen or consider new requests for similar options!