Do not change 'date updated' when changing tags, notebooks, note title

[humanengr 55]

The default should be to change 'date updated' only when note content is changed.

Make this the default convention.

Perhaps include a settings option for users who prefer 'date updated' be changed when changing tags, notebooks, note title (either as a single or separate sub-options).

[AlbertR 689]

Tags are not part of notes. They are stored in an index database (like index data to accelerate search functions). So if you apply tags to notes or remove tags from notes or rename tags, nothing of the note content is changed.
It is a design fail of V10 to change a notes's updated time on changing tags. And that's that.

[AlbertR 689]

Yep. At least changes on Tag should not change note's update date. Tagging is often used temporarily to shrink down search result. 

[caipiao 7]

Agreed - literally creating an account to request this. One of the key reasons I am still using Legacy... impossible to sort / reorganise notes after creating the "content" so to speak! 

[humanengr 55]

You're wrong:

12 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

in a field that always have been written by EN … Most accept that the created and modified fields are under system control.

The field wasn't always written by EN. Pre-v10, users could edit the 'date modified' field. (They could also edit the 'date created' field, but that's not what's being discussed.)

And you're missing the point.

When changing tags or moving between notebooks, EN should provide an option in settings to not update 'date modified when tags are changed or when notes are moved between notebooks. Tags and file location are metadata, not content.

Pre-v10 EN didn't update 'date modified' when changing tags or moving between notebooks.

Neither does MacOS — which also doesn't update 'date modified' when renaming files (which supports my inclusion of 'note title' in my proposal).

EN should restore this key feature (as an option) that some experienced users have relied on.

[humanengr 55]

You still don't get it. And you're condescending.

The date updated field is metadata that the program needn't change when other metadata (tags, location, name) are changed. It should be user choice as to whether it is automatically changed.

All this proposal does is give the OPTION to restore that treatment. OPTION means you can have the current v10 treatment and others who want the pre-v10 treatment can have that.

[Sönke Luck 14]

I agree in the arguments of PinkElephant, I also hate complexity. But in this case there are different opinions about what should touch the last modified date. There is no true or false, but I think for those of us who are using this field to sort their notes, it is a disaster if after renaming a tag hundreds of notes getting touched, and removed from their context. 

[CalS 5,306]

If you've ever accidentally changed any of the above or accidentally deleted a note  tag you know how hard it can be to find and repair.  An option for those not wanting to change would be fine.

[humanengr 55]

It's not a 'core function'. If it was core, it would have been there pre-v10. And likewise in all other apps and OS's. But it's not.

This restores — as an option — pre-v10 treatment for those who prefer that.

And stop with the condescension: "We", "each personal method", "always the same", "only a fraction", "if they configure them badly".

Glad you can use the app without thinking.

[blakesphere 13]

hi there... Blake here...

original poster.

i still feel strongly about this issue in general.

Again, here's a simple use-case situation:

i re-read an old note and see a typographical error. I fix the mistake. Evernote updates the record of course.

With the new "updated" date field, it shows at the top of list when maybe it was 6  months old.

In Legacy Evernote, I could alter the update date field and put it back to the original date, when it was created.

I have many another use-cases I could share. I have many examples of how this is treated in other database applications. I do believe this is a minor oversight and I still feel it should be corrected. It is not wide-used but it will make us very happy.

 

Thank you for your time,

Blake

 

 

 

[meingraham 8]

Can I add that when you reveal encrypted text (for viewing only), this is not a note update.

You just want to view the encrypted text and are not changing the content of the note. The argument could be made that if one permanently decrypts some text, that's a content update. It could be argued both ways. But when just revealing the encrypted text, the update date should not be touched.

10.60.4-win

[Vojkan Cvijanovic 10]

+1 for the option where changing only the content of the note also updates the date.

So many times, I've wanted to correct a typo in the note's title or add a tag without altering the updated date.

[mynameisnotebody 1]

Hey everybody who likes this … there's an 'up arrow' on the topic header that we're supposed to upvote. I'm guessing Evernote staff might not take notice unless this is upvoted.

[caipiao 7]

On 3/31/2021 at 12:01 AM, mynameisnotebody said:

Hey everybody who likes this … there's an 'up arrow' on the topic header that we're supposed to upvote. I'm guessing Evernote staff might not take notice unless this is upvoted.

Upvoted - thanks! need more people though... 

[Sönke Luck 14]

This is mainly a philosophical question, and it may affect not that much people.

BUT: If you organized your work around sorting by updated date, it could be very annoying, that changing meta data touches the timestamp.

Example: By the end of the year, I move all notes from the inbox notebook to an notebook Archive_<year>. Since Evernote 10.x, this touches all update date, which makes it no longer possible to see, when I really worked on a note last time.

Example: I forgot to tag a note from a journey in 2018. Adding the appropriate tag today, moves the note out of its time context to the top of the list.

Workaround for me is using Evernote Legacy on Windows, but this will end in future, I guess.

 

Using Evernote since 2011, 13,000 notes, 40 notebooks

 

[ayearofholidays 3]

I also just made an account to ask for this feature request. I only sort my notes every once and awhile, and look at my notes sorted by last changed. After I spend some time to organize my notes, it feels more of a mess than if I had never done it at all. It's very annoying. 

[OBrien 12]

I need this option too. This is one of the things I hate about new evernote v10. 

I have the same  kind of issue when I organize many notes. after that update date means nothing to me. it's very confusing.

Why did they change how it works??

On 1/5/2022 at 5:31 PM, Sönke Luck said:

This is mainly a philosophical question, and it may affect not that much people.

BUT: If you organized your work around sorting by updated date, it could be very annoying, that changing meta data touches the timestamp.

Example: By the end of the year, I move all notes from the inbox notebook to an notebook Archive_<year>. Since Evernote 10.x, this touches all update date, which makes it no longer possible to see, when I really worked on a note last time.

Example: I forgot to tag a note from a journey in 2018. Adding the appropriate tag today, moves the note out of its time context to the top of the list.

Workaround for me is using Evernote Legacy on Windows, but this will end in future, I guess.

 

Using Evernote since 2011, 13,000 notes, 40 notebooks

 

 

[PinkElephant 8,702]

You may do what you want to do - but editing any field that is originally written and later modified by a program itself is never a good idea.

The devs don’t need to care about user activity in a field that always have been written by EN - it probably is just a tiny fraction of users who do this sort of intervention anyhow.

Most accept that the created and modified fields are under system control. For me it looks natural that when I interact with a note, the timestamp is updated.

[CalS 5,306]

Point is EN will change the modified date when the note is changed.  Pre V10 tag changes did not cause such an update.  EN did to want to change modified date with a tag change back in the day.  Which was a PITA should one accidentally delete a tag from a group of notes.  Try finding them without a modified date update.  .Different philosophy now I suppose.  Sympathies if your use case got hammered.  V10 did that to quite a few of my use cases and unfortunately I had to leave EN.

When I used EN I would change the created date to get a past document in the right place.  I did so at my own peril but knew EN wasn't going to change the created date once the note was created.  So low risk.

[humanengr 55]

24 minutes ago, CalS said:

Sympathies if your use case got hammered.  V10 did that to quite a few of my use cases and unfortunately I had to leave EN.

When I used EN I would change the created date to get a past document in the right place.

Appreciate the sympathy on the different use cases — ergo, my proposal as a settings option.

(FWIW, I also used 'date created' "to get a past document in the right place"; I didn't include 'date created' in my list b/c I imagined greater objections to that — but am willing to include if more express support.)

Edited May 8, 2022 by humanengr
flexible

[humanengr 55]

You're still wrong.

On 5/7/2022 at 3:14 PM, PinkElephant said:

My opinion is not to use fields under system control to store any information relevant to me.

Pre-v10 they could be modified by users. So they were not "under system control".

You're not helping the discussion.

[Boot17 1,529]

The main reason I kept legacy around was so that I could update the modify date and time but it became a hassle so I had to stop caring.

I get having a modify date time and having the program do whatever it needs to do with those dates whenever it feels that a note has been modified.

One of the nice things about Evernote though is that I can view all my most recently updated notes -- like on a Monday to go back and see what I changed or added over the last week. However, if I were to rename a tag and that tag had hundreds of old notes, all those old notes would now push down the "real" updated notes from last week. Kind of a bummer - but oh well.

[OBrien 12]

 

>> We see a tendency to ask for settings for each personal method of using EN.

Actully I understand what you are trying to say. generally the system should be simple without any complex customization. However, this is not that kind of thing. In my point of view, this is not even an additional function. It's the basic specification which has been changed with v10.

In any platform Mac/Linux/windows, moving a file to another directory doesn’t count as an update. Because the content of a file never change. It is a common behavier of the system.

It's the same in the real world too, when you moving a book from a shelf to another dosen't change its content.

So tagging and moving a note is the change outside of its contents, and those should not be count as "updated".

After all, here is "General Feature Requests" which is exactly the place to make these demands. I'm not sure what bothers you so much.

[Aggressively Sensitive 3]

For the way I use evernote, I really need this change. I move notes around and re-tag regularly and this kills my flow. If it can't be changed wholesale, it should at least be an option.

[AlbertR 689]

5 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Note title is not part of notes.  It's stored in an index database

THX - just verified how Windows (and I'm sure other OS, too) work with file names:

• If you change the name, the updated date is NOT changed
• If you change the folder, the update date is NOT changed

@EN: It is a design fail of V10 to change updated time when changing tags, notebooks, note title. (even if @PinkElephant might not go with this 😉)

[Paddy Paddy 19]

@EN: It is a design fail to change the modified date when changing tags, moving a note to a new notebooks, changing the note title. 

Note that in Windows, moving a file or changing the file name does not change the modified date.

Only changing the content should result in a update to the modification date.

[AlbertR 689]

41 minutes ago, Sönke Luck said:

am still curios if this forum still makes sense, or if it is ignored by the new owner.

It's read but seldomly commented by new owners. And I hope that keeping discussions around such annoying behaviour alive will help to get it fixed anytime in future.

• At least changes on Tags should not change note's update date.
• Tagging is often used temporarily to shrink down search result. 

[AlbertR 689]

Just found: Removing a tag does NOT touch the Updated Date as it is done by adding a tag to note.

==> Functionality is buggy. They should repair it to never change the Updated Date whilst modifying tags of a note 😉

[Jeremy Wise 2]

I arrived here not because of tags, but because I'm organizing notes across dozens of folders, and as I move them, all the notes I move around get updated with today's date.  I totally lose the ability to see when the notes were actually last edited.  Moving notes between folders should NOT update the "last edited" date.  

[p1154 12]

The Joplin program allows transfer from Evernote and it does allow the ability to change the updated field

https://joplinapp.org/help/

[Eldorado 27]

9 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

You change a property of the note, in this case the relation note - notebook.
In terms of a database operation this is an update to the data set, in this case note metadata

No, I a normalised relational database, all metadata is stored in separate  tables (relations). A note table contains only the note ID (to reference it from other tables) and the note content (text). Titles are metadata and held (hopefully) in a seperate table. So if you change content, only an update field of the main note table has to be change - not anything within a title table.

I also would suggest to not change the update field of a note it it's title is changed or it is moved to an other notebook. This often is done during re-oranganizing your notes.

9 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

The Solomonic option to present an option of possible action, an let the user toggle it as they want is always right - and would create a slow piece of bloated software

Checking a simple flag is something like nothing during this process. Bloated software is a result of over-developed UI with gimmicks only for beginners and management...

[DTLow 5,743]

10 minutes ago, humanengr said:

'date updated' be changed when changing tags, notebooks, note title

No objection to options   
imho  The default should be any update be reflected in the "date updated"

[humanengr 55]

On Mac, convention is to not update for any of those — so default of 'none' would be consistent there.

UPDATE: At this point (2018/05/08) it looks like, of those who expressed an opinion, those who favor having "change 'date updated' only when note content is changed" as the default outnumber those in favor of having "change 'date updated' when either note content or note metadata (tags, notebook, title) are changed" as default by 8:2 (7:2 at least for tags) w/ 1 'no objection', if I count right.

Edited May 15, 2022 by humanengr
Correcting

[Mike P 2,949]

34 minutes ago, caipiao said:

Upvoted - thanks! need more people though... 

Is there a mechanism to downvote? Happy to have it as an option of course but really don't want it personally.

[PinkElephant 8,702]

I understand your use of these fields, and that it is working differently at the moment. I understand as well that you want to mold EN into what you would like it to be.

My opinion is not to use fields under system control to store any information relevant to me. You can continue to think it is a brilliant idea of "experienced" users.

To reach out to EN to get anything changed, use the feedback function build into the clients, or issue a support ticket.

 

 

[PinkElephant 8,702]

A discussion is not helped by insisting on things must be the way one wants them to be.

A field that is written by a program is always a bad idea to store own data. If there was proof needed for that fact, this thread just shows it.

But anybody go ahead, nobody needs to listen. Just don't come back and complain about lost work and data.

[PinkElephant 8,702]

We see a tendency to ask for settings for each personal method of using EN. The argument is always the same: „Oh, I know only a fraction of users do as I do, but with a setting we could be fine.“

What this does not take into account is that each additional setting drives complexity and makes the app in total less usable. Users need to understand settings, if they configure them badly, they often have problems to analyze the interaction between settings and reconfigure. This is my experience here on the forum.

My opinion in this respect is simple: As little settings as possible, and no settings on core functions like updating a „changed“ date. When I touch a note in any respect, the „changed“ date is updated, without a need to think about it. This is simple, reflects what has happened - and works free of settings.

[DTLow 5,743]

4 minutes ago, AlbertR said:

Tags are not part of notes. They are stored in an index database

Note title is not part of notes.  It's stored in an index database

[PinkElephant 8,702]

@AlbertR You know how tuskers do: They ask you "Which way" - and then walk down the other trail 😉

[Sönke Luck 14]

I am wondering if somebody from Evernote is reading all these discussions. Maybe I do not understand how this feature request forum works …

AlbertR calls it a design fail. I would not take these hard words - but in principle he is totally right! Even if Evernote isn‘t willing to change this, they should be so fair and share their arguments.

[PinkElephant 8,702]

@Paddy Paddy No @EN here, just other users.

You put a very high evaluation on your very personal opinion. If others do it fine - doing it yourself …

Using boldface does not change the truth behind a statement, it just enhances the impression of noise without value to me.

Currently there are 15 votes in as many months for this thread - it seems the issue is much less popular than you try to make people think.

[CalS 5,306]

Ever try to find a note after accidentally changing a tag?  In old EN , good luck.

[Pere 27]

I have been using folders to organize my notes for almost 10 years. Now, I need to change to tags, because I want to determine the context with the tag and the team/person with whom I share the note with the folder.

This means I have to tag more than 10k notes, and then move them to the new folders.

This would mess all updated dates and create great havock. I'm blocked. I cannot apply this change due to this design decision which breaks with the behaviour of legacy Evernote.

What should I do?

p.s. Furthermore, I cannot edit tags to more than 50 notes at a time, which is also a huge pain.

[CalS 5,306]

Make the changes using legacy?

[Boot17 1,529]

I made quite a few changes to some Task due dates today --from the Task slide-out menu-- and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it didn't change the modify date of the note that they were attached to.

Then -- I went to a note itself and changed a Task due date in it and it *did* then change the modify date of the note.

So it looks like you can change any Task data from the slide-out menu and it won't update the modify date of the note, but any changes from in the note to a task will update the modify date.

Anyway, thought it was semi-related to this discussion and wanted to share.

Also kind of funny when I was searching for this thread to comment on, I ran across this older one where the OP was wanting Evernote Legacy to update the modify date.

[Pere 27]

15 hours ago, Boot17 said:

Anyway, thought it was semi-related to this discussion and wanted to share.

 

I think it is very related and it shows that the system is not coherent now. Probably tasks live in a separat database, that's why the behaviour is different when you work from the pane or from a note.

[Pere 27]

On 11/9/2022 at 4:52 PM, CalS said:

Make the changes using legacy?

Is there any risk? I fear it will mess with my tasks, which are not supported by legacy. I use tasks a lot and I depend on them for my work.

[CalS 5,306]

5 hours ago, Pere said:

Is there any risk? I fear it will mess with my tasks, which are not supported by legacy. I use tasks a lot and I depend on them for my work.

Don't know the answer to that.  You could query support re potential issues or make a small change followed by other incremental changes if things seem okay.  Rumor has it you can have new and old open at the same time.

[Pere 27]

On 11/11/2022 at 8:46 PM, CalS said:

Don't know the answer to that.  You could query support re potential issues or make a small change followed by other incremental changes if things seem okay.  Rumor has it you can have new and old open at the same time.

I have 20k notes. A lot of potential for messy changes.

[CalS 5,306]

1 hour ago, Pere said:

I have 20k notes. A lot of potential for messy changes.

For sure.  Hence the do it in small batches.  You could copy a subset of notes to a new notebook and run your tests there.  Less likely to do damage.

[Boot17 1,529]

On 11/11/2022 at 7:35 AM, Pere said:

Is there any risk? I fear it will mess with my tasks, which are not supported by legacy.

I doubt it. Changing the tag doesn't change the note content. On Legacy, the modify/update date on the note doesn't even change when you modify tags.

But if I were you, regardless of anyone's assurances (even if Support were to weigh-in on it), I'd do like CalS suggests and make a copy of one of your notebooks and test it out for yourself.

[blakesphere 13]

I support this request.

I raised it with support and in the discussion forums.

I regularly change tags and book/folder for notes and the UPDATED date is revised. This is a new behaviour in Evernote 10; the legacy versions did not do this.

I've argued that moving a note from one book to another should not change the date - a primary use-case is MISFILED notes. If I create a note in the wrong folder, and a month later discover this, I do not want it showing as edited today.

This irks me so much I keep Legacy Evernote 6 on a different computer to correct the improperly dated notes...

Blake

 

 

[boneycur 19]

On 11/17/2022 at 10:07 AM, blakesphere said:

This irks me so much I keep Legacy Evernote 6 on a different computer to correct the improperly dated notes...

Not to veer from the subject of this post, but I run Legacy and V10 on the same (Windows) computer at the same time. It can be a lifesaver.

[PinkElephant 8,702]

The legacy client (the one with the grey icon) was designed to be installed side by side. The only thing to remember is that each brings its own copy of the database. This doubles the amount of storage needed. And for me it mixed up all the right click sharing, print to xxx, save here or there options, because everything showed up twice. So I decided to get rid of the old warrior.

I still feel quite alive and ticking ...

[davebenz 2]

It’s 2023, and apparently this still hasn’t been fixed.

I changed a bunch of tags today just to subdivide a tag (to make them more specific) and now all of those old Notes show up at the top of my sort on date last updated. Yuck. 

[Sönke Luck 14]

I am curious whether the new owner will solve this. Whether he even takes note of this forum.

SInce a couple of versions, this is not the only issue. When I open an old note on the mobile client, the content is loaded from the server, this touches the modufication date, and the old note appears on the top of the list. Without doing any change, actually.

[Mike P 2,949]

19 minutes ago, Sönke Luck said:

SInce a couple of versions, this is not the only issue. When I open an old note on the mobile client, the content is loaded from the server, this touches the modufication date, and the old note appears on the top of the list. Without doing any change, actually.

I think this is a bug. See

The topic of this post is "Do not change 'date updated' when changing tags, notebooks, note title" and relates to a design choice made by the developers. It does not need "fixing" because it isn't broken - it does what they intended. Whether they made the right decision is a matter of opinion and people can lobby for a change back to the original legacy behaviour if that is important to them.

[Sönke Luck 14]

You are right. I am still curios if this forum still makes sense, or if it is ignored by the new owner. Any ideas?

[PinkElephant 8,702]

In general I agree that depending on a use case it can be overdone to always update the update date. It is for sure overdone when it updates just after a note was viewed !

To keep an issue on the agenda, I think sending them support tickets is the more direct approach. It may change with BS management now, but up to this year feature requests in the forum didn't move much, if anything.

[AlbertR 689]

On 5/8/2022 at 12:14 AM, PinkElephant said:

To reach out to EN to get anything changed, use the feedback function build into the clients, or issue a support ticket.

Done. They told me that "this is currently an expected behavior" for EN10 😞
But my request has been moved to their product team "including all our feedback towards the current behavior".

Keep fingers crossed to get an option to configure the behavior 🙏
I'll come back to this later...

[Sönke Luck 14]

Great thanks for this!

[Mike P 2,949]

28 minutes ago, AlbertR said:

Just found: Removing a tag does NOT touch the Updated Date as it is done by adding a tag to note.

Not my experience in 10.59.5.

[p1154 12]

It's been a couple months.  Has anyone heard if there are any plans to add the Legacy ability to modify the "updated" date?  There are many Legacy users who depend on that feature.  Thanks!  

[meingraham 8]

12 minutes ago, p1154 said:

It's been a couple months.  Has anyone heard if there are any plans to add the Legacy ability to modify the "updated" date?  There are many Legacy users who depend on that feature.  Thanks!  

Crickets!

[s2sailor 2,411]

58 minutes ago, p1154 said:

It's been a couple months.  Has anyone heard if there are any plans to add the Legacy ability to modify the "updated" date?  There are many Legacy users who depend on that feature.  Thanks!  

There has been no word but since it has been discussed at length in the forum, I have to believe they are aware of the request.  My guess is that they are using this field internally and are unlikely to make this change.  We may be better off requesting they add an additional, customizable, sortable field, that we can use as we want.  As it is now, sort by updated date, which I use all the time, is not very useful.

[p1154 12]

2 hours ago, s2sailor said:

There has been no word but since it has been discussed at length in the forum, I have to believe they are aware of the request.  My guess is that they are using this field internally and are unlikely to make this change.  We may be better off requesting they add an additional, customizable, sortable field, that we can use as we want.  As it is now, sort by updated date, which I use all the time, is not very useful.

The sort by updated date is very very useful for some people.  In particular if you have a note that is very old and infrequently used, and you want to keep the updated date five or ten years in the past then you need the ability to edit the updated field.  I really really hope they add this ability ASAP as quite a few people are still using Legacy because they need to edit the updated field.  

[p1154 12]

I and many others agree with you.  This has been discussed many times and Evernote V10 is not going to add the ability to change the "updated" date.  

I have also asked for this feature many times and I am told it will not be added.  

[meingraham 8]

7 minutes ago, p1154 said:

.. I am told it will not be added.  

Did they provide their rationale for why they don't want to change how the updated flag is managed?

[p1154 12]

It sounds like the "updated" field is used internally by the program and it is not easy to change it.  I have asked several times for this feature and several Level 5 experts say it is not easy to add.  I have switched my new notes to Joplin and now have full control of the updated field in a different program.  Joplin is a lot more like Evernote Version 6 which is what I preferred to use anyway.  

[meingraham 8]

I wish they had left well enough alone. It didn't use to change the updated field when those actions were performed but at some point (don't ask me what version, it's been a couple of years or so), the updated field started behaving this way... and it's annoying. I sort by updated to keep my "active" notes at the top. And just looking at the contents w/o actually making textual changes makes "old" notes pop to the top.

[p1154 12]

I agree with you.  I rely on the same field as well.  As I mentioned Joplin is similar to Evernote v6 and allows the updated field to be user edited

[AlbertR 689]

1 hour ago, p1154 said:

I agree with you.  I rely on the same field as well.  As I mentioned Joplin is similar to Evernote v6 and allows the updated field to be user edited

Yep - but editing this field would be only a weak workaround for this dangerous fail. EN should mark a note as updated only if

• content is changed
• attachments are changed
• title is changed (*)

All other metadata changes must not change the updated date:

• tags
• creation date
• reminder and reminder done dates
• notebook assignment

(*) Note's title is metadata because it is not part of the core content. So we might discuss whether a title change should modify the updated date also. I can imagine that some people even want to avoid to modify it during gardening sessions around their notes 😉

 

 

[p1154 12]

I completely agree with you!!!  This is why I am in the process of moving to Joplin. 

[s2sailor 2,411]

1 hour ago, AlbertR said:

EN should mark a note as updated only if

• content is changed
• attachments are changed
• title is changed (*)

In your opinion.

Personally, I tend to add key words to titles after the fact and I would not want this to change the date. It would be best for users to be able to select in settings which changes would trigger the date change.

Edit - you captured this concern later in your comment, thanks.

[Sönke Luck 14]

Is someone from Evernote listening this thread? The current behavior will let move away a  lot of people. Evernote is still the best note-taking app, but this "feature" makes it unusable.

[davebenz 2]

7 hours ago, s2sailor said:

In your opinion.

Personally, I tend to add key words to titles after the fact and I would not want this to change the date. It would be best for users to be able to select in settings which changes would trigger the date change.

Edit - you captured this concern later in your comment, thanks.

 

8 hours ago, p1154 said:

I completely agree with you!!!  This is why I am in the process of moving to Joplin. 

I will have to consider that.  When a an application development team continues to ignore requests for reasonable updates/fixes, it’s time to give my money to a different company. 

[PinkElephant 8,702]

This is again one of these weird posts following the story line „If you don’t do what I want, how I want and when I want I will withdraw my generous monetary support from your miserable dev team“. Replace „generous monetary support“ by paying for a regular subscription.

This behavior I usually observe when parents try to nudge their 6 year olds past the last 4m of sweet goods stacked right in front of the cashiers. Do you really expect to be taken serious that way ?

[Sönke Luck 14]

Unfortunately, PinkElephant is not able to answer my arguments. Just repeating your polemic posts is not helpfull to disuss the issue.

I just like to get answers to questions like this:

Moving a note from 2020 to another notebook changes the timestamp. What is the argument doing so?

 

[PinkElephant 8,702]

You change a property of the note, in this case the relation note - notebook.

In terms of a database operation this is an update to the data set, in this case note metadata.

It is NOT the question if this would be an update of the data - it clearly is. The question is whether showing this update should be suppressed to please some users. As this thread proves, there is no simple answer to that, because every user has his own set of opinion about what makes up a change.

The Solomonic option to present an option of possible action, an let the user toggle it as they want is always right - and would create a slow piece of bloated software, because the app would need to query these preferences every time a note is changed. Personally I don't like these "just give them options and shut up" solutions.

Personal remark: I'm thrilled to use my imagination to see reason behind naming notebooks after calendar years. In general it is not, this is a classical use case for tags. But OK, changing tags is seen as an update either ...

[s2sailor 2,411]

3 hours ago, Sönke Luck said:

Is someone from Evernote listening this thread?

Likely no.  This is primarily a users forum.  If you want to ensure Evernote sees your comment, either create a problem ticket or provide feedback to them.

[PinkElephant 8,702]

You change the note, the date is updated. How shall the logic behind it know you just meant a typo ?

[s2sailor 2,411]

Personally, I would like to have an option to update the date only when the note content has been changed and not any of the metadata.  Yes, this would need to be a separate variable from the one that determines sync status.

[davebenz 2]

I personally never reorganize, fix titles or any other metadata unless absolutely necessary. I would rather live with a mess than ***** up all of my “Last Updated” dates.

I wish that they would give us this option. Maybe one of their competitors will, and I’ll jump over to them. 

[PinkElephant 8,702]

As always the advise is not to try to use fields under system control for storing any information of value. What makes up a „relevant“ change remains anybody’s own preference. 

The system uses any change to update the field.

You can use tags to get an independent hold on notes you think you will need again - or use the „pin to notebook“ recently added.

[AlbertR 689]

But

• What makes up a „relevant“ change remains anybody’s own preference.

and

• The system uses any change to update the field.

is a contradiction: If the system desides what my preference has to be... 😤

I think every average developer understands, that a note change should cover only note content changes. All other changes are changes of the note's metadata. If you move an important paper document from one folder to an other, the document itself will never be changed. If you manage an index of your documents and decide to hold an additional index for any other purpose, the document itself will never be changed.

My first example reflects a notebook change, the second the note's tags.

Even if I change the creation date of a note, this should not change the updated date because the creation date reflects the date of the note's content (so it is metadata). Currently the creation date of a note shows the date, EN gets informed about a new note. It's kind of afterwork to correct the creation date (i.e. the date a newpaper article was released) whereas the updated dated might continue to show the date I've added the copy to EN.

[PinkElephant 8,702]

The system simply takes any change to a note (= write action to the database) and calls it an update. Which - surprise - is exactly what it is.

What this thread is all about is to make a huge fuzz about this simple criteria: Make THIS write action an update, but not THAT, and make it a user definition to distinguish THIS and THAT.

This is what I call bloating a software. It’s not for the sake of something - it’s just because old habits die hard, and some people want to continue to use the update time stamp for other purposes.

My point is: Just accept it does what it says - to record when ANYTHING on that note was changed the last time.

If you want a note to stand out, tag it or pin it.

[yankru 14]

@PinkElephantAs usual, your explanations are not correct. How do you explain that the "Pin to Notebook" action doesn't change the Updated Date?

[meingraham 8]

 

 

3 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

The system simply takes any change to a note (= write action to the database) and calls it an update. Which - surprise - is exactly what it is.

...

@PinkElephant - What logic would you apply for "Reveal encrypted content" to justify this as a change to the note? When one takes this action, one can read the encrypted text. Then, as soon as one "leaves" the note, the text reverts to being "non-viewable". No change is made to the content of the note (i.e., there is no update to the note). However, in this case, Evernote changes the date updated of the note.

One could, perhaps, make an argument for having an audit trail on actions taken on the note. For example, any time a user views encrypted text, or a user makes a change to the note. Audit trails are important in some corporate and government applications. But I'm not proposing this as this would indeed be software bloat for the "less formal" use case for which Evernote targets at this time.

[s2sailor 2,411]

5 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

My point is: Just accept it does what it says - to record when ANYTHING on that note was changed the last time.

We understand your point … we don’t agree.  This request is far from bloatware.  We need a variable separate from one that tracks sync status that we can sort on.  Currently, sorting on date updated is meaningless.  I agree with @AlbertR that note change would generally be understood to be content change only.  We now have a few ways to highlight or pin a note, which is great, but that is not what this is about.

[AlbertR 689]

5 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

The system simply takes any change to a note (= write action to the database)

All we want is to change the trigger from "any change to the database" to "any change of a specific record (note content) of a specific table of the database". That's not rocket science. No-one is in hope to get a matrix of options to do or do not change this date.

5 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Which - surprise - is exactly what it is.

Did you take all things in life simply what it is or do you have sometimes some suggestions for future changes? (Hint: We're in a forum called "General Feature Requests")

Moreover - surprise - I submitted a ticket (#3719536) on that before over a year and got a personal answer that contained the following

... I've made sure that this extensive and detailed list reaches our development team. While we can’t commit to getting all feature requests into the product, we do rely on our community to tell us what they’d like to see in the future.

 

It makes me optimistic for the future that all here (with one excption 😉) would like get the updated date changed only on note content changes.

[Nigel Pearson 0]

This feature also happens when you restore an old version of a note from its History. (new title, Updated=Just now).
Not a big deal for most users? (because restoring is an emergency, not a regular workflow activity?)

However, after moving some notes to better named Notebooks, this bug/feature has been biting me for several months now, so I have been thinking about alternatives.

 

How about an external utility app, which connects to the EverNote database, lets you browse to the note, and change Updated to an older date.
Looking at the service API, wondering if a call to updateNote(...note.updated) with an old timestamp, but an incremented updateSequenceNum, might do the trick.

 

(I used to code, but brain is probably too old now. Not sure if I'm up for developing such a utility)

[AlbertR 689]

12 hours ago, Nigel Pearson said:

How about an external utility app ... [to] change Update to an older date.

That's the wrong way. We should not rely on heavy workaround (that would need additional tools) to overcome EN misses.

Updated should reflect only Content-Updates. Fullstop.

[PinkElephant 8,702]

Actually I disagree: For me any change is an update, being in the notes body, the title, the tags or the notebook. For me it’s logical that such a note will register as „updated“.

If I want to come back to recently changed notes, I want to find these changes quick as well - which is the main function of an „updated“ time stamp.

[meingraham 8]

 

@PinkElephant crickets...

[PinkElephant 8,702]

I don't encrypt text (I find it to be a doubtful approach to privacy, and store sensitive notes in my password manager).

So I have the luxury to be able to pass on this question.

We had a bug a while ago when only viewing a note was changing the "updated" field. Since nothing was changed, I spoke against it and even raised a support ticket. But will a system know an encrypted content was changed, when it should not be allowed to "read" it while not encrypted ?

It probably depends on the way the encryption works. If decrypting is an action, and encrypting another, and it always writes the encrypted content back, the database could only know that nothing was changed when it would hold a copy of the old "snippet", and compare it (or it's hash) with the new "snippet" after re-encryption. I doubt something that complex is done just for the sake of a field in the metadata.

[s2sailor 2,411]

I’ve noticed recently that some notes with tasks have been showing up as changed even when I haven’t actively changed or done anything to them.  On investigation it appears that tasks that change status, like due today, or overdue trigger a date updated change.  I suppose that since a task is a component of a note this could arguably be considered content change, but I wish this didn’t affect the update date either.

[meingraham 8]

@PinkElephant,

Regardless of whether you personally use a feature or not, my point being, this topic has validity in that not every "touch" is an update. And, before EN was re-architected, encryption worked how I described; no change, no update.

edit - To clarify - there are two encryption actions: reveal and decrypt permanently. Reveal just lets you view the encrypted content. Decrypt permanently is as it sounds. I would expect the latter to be treated as an content change, of course.

P.S. Encryption isn't the only access restriction I have on my EN notes. It does happen to be the only reason I'm still using EN. Otherwise I would have made the switch when EN started restricting the number of devices and surely now that the number of notes are limited. I'm just one workaround from making that switch... so I'd love to have it behave a little more toward how users would like vs. how the devs tell us we should like it.

Edited August 16 by meingraham
Adding clarification

[AlbertR 689]

17 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Actually I disagree

Your "actually" gives hope 😉

One solution would be to give notes an additional property "ContentUpdatedDate" that should be configurable in Note lists as a separate sortable column.

But the easiest would be to change the current meaning "Updated should reflect only Content-Updates."