What each sentence says
The exact wording depends on what happened. On your own activity page, sentences about your own actions start with "You"; an action an administrator took on your behalf starts with "An admin". Examples you'll actually see:
- Uploading a file: "You uploaded
<file name>" - Deleting a file: "You deleted
<file name>" - Sharing a file: "You shared
<file name>with<people>", or "You stopped sharing<file name>with<people>", or "You changed who can see<file name>" - Creating a public link: "You created a share link for
<file name>" (with "that expires on<date>" added if it does) - Revoking a public link: "You revoked the share link for
<file name>" - Someone downloading through a public link: "
<file name>was downloaded through its share link" — the person downloading is never named here - Running a tool: a sentence naming what you did and to how many files, with " — the job failed" added if the job didn't succeed. The verb matches the tool:
| Tool | Verb in the sentence |
|---|---|
| Merge | merged |
| Split | split |
| Compress (PDF or image) | compressed |
| Convert | converted |
| OCR | ran OCR on |
| Rotate | rotated |
| Add watermark | watermarked |
| Protect with a password | encrypted |
| Remove a password | decrypted |
| Sign PDF | signed |
| Black out parts of a PDF | redacted |
For example: "You compressed 3 files", "You merged 1 file", "You ran OCR on <file name>", "You signed <file name>", "You encrypted <file name> — the job failed" if that particular job didn't succeed.
- Signing in: "You signed in" (or "You signed in to DocuFlow for the first time" the very first time)
- Signing out: "You signed out"
- Renaming a file: "You renamed
<old name>to<new name>" - Changing a file's tags: "You tagged
<file name>with<tags>", or "You removed the tag<tag>from<file name>" (or "tags" for more than one), or "You changed the tags on<file name>" when both happened together - Moving several files at once: "You moved 3 files to reports/2026" ("Library" for the top of your folders). Moving a single file is not listed here — like renaming one, it's you filing your own document — and neither is making a folder, which changes nothing anyone else sees.
- Renaming or moving a folder: "You renamed folder reports to reports-2026 (12 files)" — the number is how many files went with it.
- Deleting a folder: "You deleted folder q1"
- Changing your own settings: "You updated your settings", with the specific settings named in parentheses when the server knows which ones changed
If an action doesn't match any of the sentences above — something new, or something the app doesn't have special wording for yet — the row falls back to naming the action plainly rather than showing nothing.
Device-side events
Three kinds of events are recorded straight from your own device rather than by the server, and you'll see them here the same way as anything else:
- Signing out: "You signed out" — recorded the moment you select Log out, on both web and desktop.
- Deleting a file on this device (desktop only): "You deleted
<file name>from this device". - Saving a file on this device (desktop only): "You saved
<file name>to this device" — recorded whenever you save a file through the desktop save dialog.
If your device is offline when one of these happens, it's held and sent once you're back online — it still appears on this page once that catches up, with its original time. DocuFlow retries sending held events on its own, backing off a little longer between each attempt if the first ones don't get through, for up to five tries before it gives up on that particular event. If you were signed out as a guest when one of these happened (desktop only, with no account signed in), it's dropped rather than queued — there's no account to attribute it to, so nothing appears here for it.
Everything else you see on this page — uploads, deletes, shares, running a tool, and the rest — is recorded by DocuFlow's servers the moment it happens, not by your device, so it doesn't depend on your connection at all.