Collaborate with Others on Timelines

Preceden's built-in collaboration features let you share a timeline with someone else so that they can edit it alongside you.

Collaboration is included on our Pro plans. If your plan does not include collaborators, the Collaborators dialog is covered by a notice with a View Plans button.

Inviting Collaborators

Click the Share button above your timeline, then Invite Collaborators:

That opens the Collaborators dialog, where you can invite others to edit your timeline:

The people you invite can edit your timeline for free.

Collaborators get the one timeline you invited them to, not the rest of your account. To give someone access to every timeline on the account, including ones created later, add them to a team plan instead. See Add Team Members to Your Account.

Once you have invited someone, the Share menu item reads Collaborators followed by the number of people you have invited, rather than Invite Collaborators.

Managing Collaborators

The Collaborators dialog lists everyone you have invited. Each person is marked Invitation Sent until they accept, then Invitation Accepted.

• Resend appears beside an invitation that hasn't been accepted yet and emails it again. It can take several minutes to arrive.
• Remove takes the person off the timeline after you confirm. If they had accepted, they lose access to the timeline. If they hadn't, the invitation is canceled and its link stops working.

Accepting an Invitation

When someone invites you, you'll get an email saying they have invited you to collaborate on a timeline. Click Accept Invitation in it:

• If you're already signed in to Preceden, you become a collaborator right away. The invitation goes to whichever account you're signed in to, so switch accounts first if you need to.
• If you have an account but aren't signed in, the invitation is accepted and Preceden asks you to sign in.
• If you don't have an account, you'll see a sign-up page with the invited email address filled in, and the timeline is shared with you as soon as you sign up.

You don't need the email to accept. Any invitation sent to your account's email address also appears above your timelines on the Timelines dashboard, with the email address of the person who invited you and an Accept button.

Once you accept, the timeline appears on your Timelines dashboard alongside your own.

When an Invitation Doesn't Work

If Preceden can't send an invitation, it says why in a red bar at the top of the Collaborators dialog and leaves what you typed in the email field so you can correct it:

• You must enter an email. What you typed has no @ in it. Preceden checks this before it contacts the server at all.
• Email should look like an email address. There is an @, but the rest isn't a valid address.
• Email has already been invited. That person is on the list already. Use Resend beside their name instead of inviting them a second time.
• Email needs to belong to someone else. It is the email address on your own account. You already have full access as the timeline's creator, so there is nothing to accept.

On the other side, clicking Accept Invitation in the email can fail too:

• The invitation you were sent is invalid. Please ask the timeline creator to invite you again. The invitation no longer exists. Removing someone from a timeline deletes their invitation, and a link that was broken or truncated on its way to you looks the same to Preceden. You'll see this message on the sign-up page.
• This invitation has already been accepted. The link has been used. An invitation works once, so ask for a new one if it went to the wrong account.
• You cannot accept an invitation to collaborate on your own timeline. You are signed in as the account that created the timeline. Sign out and sign back in as the invited person, then open the link again.

Resending can fail as well. If Resend reports a technical issue, reload the page: the most likely explanation is that the person accepted the invitation in the meantime, and an accepted invitation can't be sent again.

Collaborator Limitations

A collaborator has full access to your timeline except for the ability to:

• Delete the entire timeline
• Change the collaboration settings
• Change the visibility settings

Collaborators can duplicate the timeline and import events into it from a spreadsheet, even without a paid plan of their own. A copy they make is saved to their own account and leaves your original unchanged. See Duplicate a Timeline and Import a CSV or Excel File.

Real-Time Updates

Real-time updates are not currently available on Preceden, though it's something we'd like to add one day. If you have the timeline open while a collaborator is making changes on their own computer, you'll have to reload the page to see their changes, and they'll have to reload to see yours.

Seeing What Changed

Click History, above your timeline beside its name and visibility label, to open the Latest Content Changes dialog. It lists the timeline's 50 most recent changes, newest first, with the date and time in your own timezone, the email address of the person who made the change, what they did (for example Event Created, Layer Updated or Timeline Duplicated), and the old and new values.

• The button is there for you and for your collaborators, and it is hidden on narrow screens, so open the timeline on a larger screen to reach it.
• The Details column covers names, descriptions, start dates and end dates. An edit that changes none of those, such as recoloring an event, is not listed.
• A spreadsheet import is recorded as a single Spreadsheet Import row giving the number of events it added, rather than one row per event.
• If someone has changed their email address since they made an edit, the list shows their current one.
• The list records what changed, it does not undo it. There is no way to roll a timeline back to an earlier state, so keep a duplicate of a timeline you are about to rework heavily.

Number of Collaborators

Pro plans include up to 100 collaborators per timeline. Once a timeline reaches that limit, the invitation form is replaced by a notice telling you the limit you have reached and an Upgrade to Invite More button.