Feature Request: discard local changes

[NamelessVoice]

Expected behaviour

It should be possible to revert local changes for Pages viewed or modified on the WordPress Android app.

Actual behaviour

When viewing a page (even without making changes), the page is marked as "Local changes".
There is no way to revert those local changes, short of deleting and re-adding the site from the app.

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

1. Connect to a WordPress blog with Pages.
2. Open one of the pages in the editor (you don't need to change anything.)
3. Go back. The page will be marked as "local changes"
4. Try to revert those changes, there's no option to do so.

Tested on [device], Android [version], WPAndroid [version]

Samsung Galaxy S5, Android 9, WPAndroid 15.2.1

Additional note:

This is very similar to issue #5681, except that one applies only to Posts, and not Pages.

[rachelmcr]

Thanks for this report! I can reproduce the issue with the "Local Changes" label appearing when I open a page from a self-hosted site in the app editor (both block editor and classic Aztec editor), without making any changes to the page.

The issue with reverting local changes seems to apply to both posts and pages. I no longer see the "Discard local changes" option added in #8005, even on posts. (Some sites can access revision history in the editor and select a past revision to revert changes, but this isn't supported on self-hosted sites.) Confusion around how to revert local changes was also raised in #10701 (comment) and probably needs some attention overall.

[NamelessVoice]

I also couldn't find any way to access the "discard local changes" option for posts when I tried experimenting, but wasn't sure if I was maybe doing something wrong there.

Can confirm that I was testing with a self-hosted site.

The issue makes me afraid of editing the site from multiple devices in case they get out of sync and I lose changes.

[rachelmcr]

The issue makes me afraid of editing the site from multiple devices in case they get out of sync and I lose changes.

That's understandable. The good news is that if you update the post/page to save/publish the local changes in the app, you can always review and restore previous revisions from the web editor, so changes won't be entirely lost. But that isn't a great experience while using the app.

@bummytime I think this is worth some attention, given that various issues related to local changes are coming up on both platforms. Do you think some initial investigation would fit into Groundskeeping or would it be better to propose as a small project?

[designsimply]

I searched and found that, after some discussion, the "discard local changes" action was removed from the editor overflow menu in v12.9 in #10127 for the following reasons:

Inconsistencies with iOS and web
Low usage
All solutions add more complexity than value added
Users accidentally tapping the button and losing work they've invested in per #9971

Source: #9561 (comment)

@osullivanchris this appears to be a frustrating pain point for a smaller number users overall (see this latest example) so it's pretty hard to tell whether or not adding the option back would cause more problems (see bullet list above) than it would alleviate. In any case, I agree with rachelmcr that it's project-worthy. wdyt?

[astralbodies]

I'd vote for having a way to discard changes; it doesn't take much to make the page/post be considered "dirty" requiring a push even if I don't make any real changes to it. Since I can't diff the changes, I am uneasy about just pushing the local changes remotely to resolve the edits.