Live-share: Toggle read-only to edit/write

[mittalyashu]

Allow the host to change the session from read-only to edit/write or vice-versa.

What could be the possible options?

1. Change the permission of a single participant from read-only to edit/write or vice-versa
2. Change the permission of all the participant from read-only to edit/write or vice-versa

cc // @tylerbuchea

[lostintangent]

@mittalyashu This is definitely something we want to add, but we wanted to get the initial read-only support out first, since for many use cases, you're either always in read/write mode (e.g. pair programming), or always read/only (e.g. education scenarios with untrusted/partially-trusted participants). Out of curiosity: what's your use case for this capability? Thanks!

[tylerbuchea]

I was the one that experienced this use case with @mittalyashu. I think the use case at its core has to do with trust.

I've created a community for strangers to exchange live share URLs (https://spectrum.chat/livecodeshare). @mittalyashu until today was a complete stranger to me, but he gave me a live share URL with read-only access then once we established a connection he explained the issue he was having with his code over live share audio.

Once I responded saying I new the solution he then felt comfortable letting me have write access. We ultimately solved the problem by restarting the session, but being able to switch back and forth would provide a nice sense of security and control over the session.

I think you're right @lostintangent this use case is not very common right now but my hope and the hope of the LiveCodeShare community is that it will become more common.

[lostintangent]

@tylerbuchea Makes total sense. Thanks for sharing that! We want to enable this capability, and we can use this issue to track progress.

Additionally, please let us know if you run into any other issues with Live Share while building your community. I'm not sure if you saw it, but we actually linked to your community from our recent release notes (the link for "online mentoring" in the paragraph explaining the read-only feature) 👍

[tylerbuchea]

No I didn't see that. That is awesome though thank you! 🎉

[w8s]

As an instructor with 50+ students in a class, it would be helpful to make a session read only, and then call on individual students to modify code during a session. Allowing 50+ to all have write access at once would be chaotic and potentially have a lot of conflicting edits at once.

I’m excited to see this feature moving forward. Thanks for your work on this service. Fantastic.

[lostintangent]

This feature is now available in the latest extension update. If you Share a read-only session, you can right-click on a guest in the Live Share tree view and give them read/write access. At any time, you can then move them back to read-only access using the same gesture. Let us know how that works out for you!