EDIT: Apologies, I totally messed up my original post with incorrect details that I misremembered about my setup, coupled with an incorrect mental model of how sharing works, so I will hide it to prevent confusion.
I’ll keep this thread focused on the (IMHO) unintuitive behavior of the search operators related to shared items, which I do think might warrant revisiting.
Original post — incorrect and irrelevant
Context: I currently have a Workflowy account for my work that’s separate from my main, personal account; however, I often take notes in the work tree about e.g. technologies I’m learning about, and these generic notes are not tied to my job, so I’d like to keep them even if I eventually leave this company, without having to keep all the company-specific notes (projects, tasks, etc.).
I have the work tree shared with my personal account for convenience [I created the work tree under my personal account and shared it with my work account (with full access)], and often mirror nodes from one into the other or vice-versa, but I want to be able to make sure I keep all the generic notes under the ownership of my main account, even when they’re nested deep in the work account’s tree. My plan is to make them into nodes in my main account, mirrored in the work tree. This is not the case now, and there are a lot of such nodes, so I would like to gradually do this organization.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good way to identify nodes that need to be processed like this. Ideally, I’d like them to have some sort of visible marker (e.g. a background color, a different bullet shape, etc.) so that as I work on my notes day-to-day, I can easily identify which nodes are owned (or not owned) by the account I’m logged in as, that may need to be reorganized as described above.
Request: I’d like if nodes had a CSS class that indicates whether they are owned by the current account or the account has merely have been given access to it. Then I could use my custom CSS browser extension to style nodes based on their ownership, without this feature incurring in any visible change for other Workflowy users
There is already a changed-by: search operator, but there’s no created-by: or owned-by: operator. The latter, in particular, would allow me to locate notes based on who owns them.
Oh, thanks, I totally missed that! However, after doing a bunch of tests, it seems like these operators are working in a way that IMHO is confusing, since, contrary to what the naming suggests, they don’t really take into account who did the sharing:
is:shared-with-me returns any items that have been explicitly shared (no matter with whom) and don’t belong to the current account
is:shared returns any items that have been explicitly shared and belong to the current account
To illustrate what I find confusing about these terms, let me give a concrete example: say that account A shares tree T (with two children, t1 and t2) with account B, and B later shares child item t1 with account C. Then, when B searches for is:shared, nothing will come up (whereas t1 would be expected), and searching for is:shared-with-me would return T and t1 (and not t2).
I believe these two operators are conflating two different concepts: the ownership of an item, and whether it is shared (and totally ignoring who did the actual sharing, and with whom).
Maybe something along these lines this might help make the results more in line with intuitive expectations:
is:shared would instead be called is:shared-by-me
is:shared-with-me would omit items whose sharing was done by the current account
(bonus) plain is:shared would return all notes that are explicitly shared, regardless of the owner
Not sure. I don’t use the share feature but have a few nodes shared to me.
IAC, in the above I don’t know why t2 would nod show up in a shared-with me in B. Logic says it should. Also don’t know the impact of sharing a share, or even if you can. That would be a security issue. Have you done that?
Maybe someone with more sharing experience can jump in.
