Comments and approval

There are two answers to a review, and the difference between them is not how positive they are. It is whether the sender has anything to do next.

Approve

It can go out. Nothing further is expected of anyone.

Request changes

Something has to change first. This one requires a comment.

Why "request changes" makes you write

Because changes without a reason is not an answer — it is a bounce. The person who made the thing is left guessing which part you meant, and the usual outcome is a second version that is wrong in a different way.

So ANVL asks for a line before it takes the verdict. It does not have to be long. "The second slide claims 40% and the report says 30%" is a complete review.

Approving does not ask for a comment, for the same reason in reverse: there is nothing the sender needs in order to act.

Changing your mind

If you gave a verdict and then noticed the thing you missed, you can take it back — while it is still yours to take back. Once the person who asked has seen the answer, undoing it would rewrite something they have already acted on, so the way forward from there is a new request rather than a quiet reversal.

What is kept

The material carries its history: who asked, who answered, what they said, and every reminder, withdrawal and undo along the way. The current state is what you see at a glance, but the sequence is still there underneath.

That matters more than it sounds. Approved on its own does not tell you whether it was approved before or after the numbers were corrected. The sequence does.

When you cannot answer

Two situations, and neither is a permission problem.

It is your own request, and you are not an admin. You cannot approve something you asked for, and that holds even if you sent it to a group you belong to. Ask someone else. Admins are exempt — otherwise a workspace with one admin could never approve anything.

You were not asked. A review goes to the people it was sent to. If you think you should have been one of them, the answer is to be added to the request rather than to be given a role — reviewing is not a role.

Admins are the exception: they can answer anything in the workspace, which makes them the fallback when whoever you asked is unavailable.