View-as: support without a password
When a member reports something you cannot reproduce from your own account, view-as renders their workspace exactly as they see it. You start it from the Workspaces tab, pick a member, and the app reloads inside that workspace under that person's view. Your own identity never changes. You are looking through their window, not logging in as them.
Starting a session
To start view-as you supply three things:
- The workspace and the member whose view you want.
- A reason, which is required and written to the log.
- A time limit, from 1 to 60 minutes (30 by default).
Two people are off-limits as targets: a member of a workspace you did not select (you can only view a user inside a workspace they actually belong to), and another operator (platform admins cannot be viewed-as).
Read-only by default
A view-as session starts read-only, and that is enforced on the server. The api refuses writes for the whole session, so a stray click cannot change anything. It is not a UI courtesy that a determined action could slip past.
While a session is live, a banner rings the entire screen and sits across the top:
- The border is amber in read-only mode.
- It names who you are viewing and which workspace.
- It counts down the time left.
- It carries an Enable editing button and an Exit button.
When the timer runs out the session ends on its own and returns you to /admin.
Arming write mode
If you need to fix something in place, press Enable editing to turn on write mode. It asks you to confirm first.
- The banner turns red, so the color alone tells you edits are now real.
- Turning on write mode is its own logged event, separate from starting the session.
- Every change you make in write mode is attributed to you, not to the member.
- Back to read-only drops you back at any time, and Exit leaves entirely.
The trail it leaves
View-as is built to be visible, not covert. Two records are written:
- A line in the target workspace's own activity feed, so the workspace sees that an operator viewed it, why, and when. Arming write mode adds a second line there.
- An entry in the operator console's View-as Log, an append-only list of every session: operator, target, workspace, reason, mode, request count, and the start, expiry, and end times.
Because the reason is mandatory and both trails are append-only, there is no way to look inside a workspace quietly.