Two people move the same card
Two people watching the same board will eventually drag the same card within the same few seconds: one triages Repricing of commercial property after the 2025 flood season into In Progress while the other closes it as Done. No change is ever written on top of a version of the item it did not read, and anyone whose change cannot be applied is told.
Before you start
Both people need permission to change the item and to make that particular transition. AnyKanban writes as the signed-in user, so each person's own permissions and each project's own work item rules apply, so a move that works for one of you can legitimately be refused for the other.
Steps
- Open the same board in two places, whether two people or two browser profiles.
- On the first board, drag Repricing of commercial property after the 2025 flood season from Triage to In Progress.
- Before the second board has refreshed, drag the same card there to Done.
- Watch both boards through their next refresh, about twenty seconds.
- Read any message that appears at the bottom center of either board. Messages clear themselves after about six seconds, so read it while it is there.
What you should see
The later drop wins, and both boards agree within one refresh. The second board keeps the card in Done; the first board moves it out of In Progress into Done on its own, with no reload and no message.
What happened underneath is the part worth knowing. The second write was refused, because it was made against a version of the item the server no longer had. The board re-read the item and applied the same move once more against the current version, and that retry is all most people ever experience of a conflict: nothing to notice, and nothing lost.
Two variations behave differently, on purpose:
- You both made the same move. Nothing is undone: the retry re-applies the state the card already has, together with the position that person dropped it at. When the state is the whole change, a checklist box you both ticked, the board sees the move as already made and writes nothing at all.
- The retry cannot be applied either, because the item changed again or because a work item rule refuses the move from where the card now actually is. Then the card snaps back to what the server holds, and a message explains: "Someone else changed this item first. The board was refreshed with their changes." for a lost race, or the server's own message when a rule was what refused it. A rejected change is never silent.
Notes
The revision check prevents stale writes, not simultaneous ones: it is not a lock, and two people moving one card is still a conversation to have. The board only guarantees that both of you end up looking at the same answer. Reordering is treated differently again: the background rank respacing that sometimes accompanies a reorder is dropped silently on a conflict, because the next refresh sorts everyone the same way anyway.