SharePoint - Approving an item using Content Approval overwrites the item's last modified by with the Approver's name

Question

This has been bugging me for a couple days now. A list has content approval and versioning on edits enabled. Here is what's happening:

1) Bob adds item - The item's Modified By is "Bob," approval status is pending and version is 1.0 2) Jake approves item - A new version is not created. Instead, the Modified By is set to "Jake" for version 1.0, effectively erasing any trace that "Bob" touched the item.

The same thing happens with edits. The "Modified By" of the latest version assumes the name of the person approving it.

This seems like a pretty glaring bug. Has anyone else ran into this and found a workaround for it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

This is a known "feature" (i.e.) bug. Somehat understandable, seeing as the last person to "edit" the file is the approver.

Even worse, when you use workflow approval on publishing pages, that get approved based on the publishing start and end date, the modified by will be the systemaccount since the approval (publishing) is performed by a timerjob.

We worked around this by adding an extra column to the list / content type, a "Contact" column, which is a person lookup field.

Answer 2

Here is the workaround in addition to the solution mentioned above by Colin, which I also recommend strongly. It is SharePoint third party tool. Just FYI