Revision/Blame Tracking

How It Works

Nobody likes to get blamed for making an incorrect change to a campaign that they didn't make. Now, you can prove that it wasn't you! AdvertServe tracks changes to user accounts, campaigns, media, groups, zones and more so you can view previous revisions of them and see who changed them.

Security Auditing

Having a revision history of all changes made to your data is also of great importance if you find yourself in a situation where someone has compromised a user account and made unauthorized changes. We would be able to look at the revision logs and quickly identify all of the changes that they made to undo them. While these sorts of incidents are rare they can happen (i.e. perhaps your laptop is stolen and has your passwords saved on it) so it's reassuring to know that measures are in place to deal with such critical situations.

Try It Out

Curious to see how the revision tracking works? I suggest that you create a new media and then make a change or two to it and save those changes. After doing so, simply click on the View Change History shortcut that appears at the top right side of the page. You'll see a screen that's similar to the following screen shot.

There are three things that you'll notice I've highlighted in the screen shot if you click to enlarge it.

1. The current revision number is 2, which means the media has been changed once since it was created.
2. The last user to have changed the media is shown in the upper right corner as well.
3. Finally you have the list of revisions, which includes when the change was made, who made it, their IP address (useful for detecting intruders) and a snapshot of the data fields with their changes.

Comparing the two revisions, I determined that the banner redirect was changed. In a future update we're going to be highlighting such changes for you. We're also planning to make it possible to roll back to a previous revision with a single click.

Closing Thoughts

This feature has been a long time coming. In fact, it had been sitting on our list of features to implement for over 9 years. That reminds me that I've been coding away at AdvertServe for a little over 17 years now. How the time flies!