Shared review: "On behalf of" - problem!

Report · Jun 17, 2020

So... I have Acrobat Pro DC (continuous update I believe it's called. Of course, it just crashed when I went to confirm the version :-))

I have two main problems that have arisen in the past month. This is one (I'll put the other in another topic.)

I initiate a Shared Review of a document to a few reviewers.

This has just started happening -- -the first person to review and Publish Comments (done from Adobe Reader DC) does so, BUT all of *my* comments now are attributed to that person with "on behalf of <me>" in the comment.

I've managed to mung things in the past on occasion and had this happen where a commenters comments get attributed to *me* on behalf of *them*, but this is new. And it's happened on several of the reviews I've done over the past few weeks.

Not a huge problem when the total number of comments is low, but when there are several dozen (or more) it becomes really hard to find that person's actual comments.

Has this happened to anybody else lately?

Any idea what is happening?

Thanks!

Report · Jul 01, 2020

I'm having a similar issue. I can't quite makes sense of what's happening, but it almost seems like the first time a new reviewer accesses the document, suddenly all of the comments are attributed to them "on behalf of" somebody else. It seems to correct itself by simply closing out of the review and reopening, but nonetheless it's annoying and confounding. Any resolutions to this?

Report · Jul 13, 2020

Hi There,

Recently, I noticed a similar issue. When adding comments before sending for the shared review, it asked me to publish existing comments, and then noted them "on behalf of" myself. I solved it with an update to Preferences:

In Acrobat: Edit > Preferences > Reviewing. Then in Shared Review Options, uncheck Show "On Behalf Of" test in comment when user takes ownership of comments in a shared review.

-H

Report · Dec 02, 2025

For what it's worth, I've observed this problem many times over the last 10+ years at two different organizations.

It happens without any discernible cause. A shared review can be progressing normally, with dozens of reviewers and hundreds of comments, all properly owned... and then one day someone joins or rejoins the review, and Acrobat or Reader unexpectedly decides to attribute every comment to that someone. The result is the disastrous "number of reviewers = 1, every comment from that reviewer, with 'On behalf of' inserted into everyone's comment."

The solution that HatFeather proposed isn't really for the root cause. HatFeather writes ..."when user takes ownership of comments in a shared review" -- but that's the problem itself. We don't want any one user to take ownership of comments. We need the ownership to remain where it began -- with the person who originally posted the comment.