Title: See Actual Changes
Last modified: August 30, 2016

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# See Actual Changes

 *  Resolved [Patabugen](https://wordpress.org/support/users/patabugen/)
 * (@patabugen)
 * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/see-actual-changes/)
 * I can see that User1 edited ProductCategoryA, but is there a way to see what 
   changes were actually made?
 * [https://wordpress.org/plugins/stream/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/stream/)

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

 *  [Luke Carbis](https://wordpress.org/support/users/lukecarbis/)
 * (@lukecarbis)
 * [10 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/see-actual-changes/#post-6642889)
 * Hi Patabugen,
 * Unfortunately not. This is a slippery slope. Categories are one thing, but what
   if Stream tracked every change that was made when you edited a post! That’s a
   lot of data.
 * Stream focuses on tracking the where / when / who of admin updates, but not the
   specific details of what. This would be far too much information to store in 
   your local database.
 *  Thread Starter [Patabugen](https://wordpress.org/support/users/patabugen/)
 * (@patabugen)
 * [10 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/see-actual-changes/#post-6642891)
 * Hey Luke,
 * Thanks for your reply. I wanted to use Stream to be able to track down when something
   was broken (and ideally by who).
 * The current problem I’m learning I can’t use Stream for us somebody has (hopefully)
   unchecked a box from a category which should be checked – I say hopefully because
   I’d rather know that it was a user than a faulty plugin.
 * So Stream has my vote for being able to track a little bit more, without it I’m
   actually not sure how useful Stream is at all – though it clearly is to so many
   users so I’d be interested in some use-cases (perhaps on your website).
 * —
    Sami
 *  [Luke Carbis](https://wordpress.org/support/users/lukecarbis/)
 * (@lukecarbis)
 * [10 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/see-actual-changes/#post-6642892)
 * Hi Sami,
 * Suppose you noticed that a category description had changed, and you weren’t 
   sure when and how, you could log into Stream and filter the results to just the
   Category taxonomy, drilling down to figure out who could have changed it.
 * In terms of other use cases, although we can’t track specifics for taxonomies
   and post types, we do track specifics for other settings. So you would be able
   to see when particular settings where changed.
 * The reason we don’t track all the changes to posts (besides the fact that it’s
   a lot of data to store) is because WordPress already keeps Post revisions, so
   you can easily drill down through the revisions to find a particular change. 
   Categories are a bit different, since there is really only category name, description
   and parent, I’m not sure how useful it would be to track those individual items.
 * If you had custom meta for your category, that becomes more difficult again. 
   For a start, Stream only knows that a term has been updated, you would have to
   tell it to look for a particular piece of information if that information isn’t
   already built into WordPress. Secondly, there are scalability issues – should
   Stream automatically check hundreds of different meta keys every time a term 
   is updated, and log the before and after values if there is a change?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

The topic ‘See Actual Changes’ is closed to new replies.

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 * 3 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [Luke Carbis](https://wordpress.org/support/users/lukecarbis/)
 * Last activity: [10 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/see-actual-changes/#post-6642892)
 * Status: resolved