The Unsolicited Feedback Loop
When you share a Google Docs document with collaborators and they open it in “Suggesting” mode, every edit they make appears as a tracked change with a coloured highlight and an associated comment bubble in the right margin. While this is the intended purpose of Suggesting mode, many collaborators accidentally leave their editing mode set to “Suggesting” from a previous session, meaning every keystroke they make — fixing a typo, adjusting a line break, or even pasting copied text — generates a new suggestion rather than a direct edit. For document owners, the result is an inbox flooded with notification emails for trivial suggestions and a document margin cluttered with dozens of pending change bubbles.
Controlling How Collaborators Edit
To stop Google Docs from automatically generating suggestions from collaborators who are editing in the wrong mode, and to reduce the noise of unnecessary suggestion notifications, you must adjust your sharing permissions and notification settings.
Open your document in Google Docs. Click the Share button in the top-right corner. In the sharing dialogue, look at the permission level granted to each collaborator. If they are set to Editor, they have full edit access and can switch between Editing and Suggesting modes at will. If you want to force them into Suggesting mode only (so their changes are always tracked for your approval), change their access to Commenter. Commenters can suggest edits and leave comments but cannot directly modify the document. To reduce notification noise from existing suggestions, click on Tools > Notification settings. Change the preference from “All” to None, or select only the specific notification types you care about (such as comments assigned to you). To quickly clear a backlog of trivial suggestions, click the Accept all or Reject all button in the suggestion toolbar that appears at the top of the document when suggestions are present.