"Preserve Editor Tracking Info" - not behaving as expected

[HH_mhugo]

I'm confused as to what the option in picture 1 does during web layer publishing. The dialog box in this picture is from ArcGIS Pro 3.1.0 in the "Publish as Web Layer" menu.

What I would expect is that the resulting AGOL web layer would have the editor tracking fields enabled, and the box in the picture 2 would come pre-checked. This picture is from the feature layer "Settings" tab in AGOL. However my experimenting does not reveal that to be the case. If I want to see the data fields normally associated with edit-tracking (editor, date and time, etc.), I still have to manually check that box in picture 2, then turn on the fields in the Data tab of that feature layer's AGOL page.

What does "Preserve Editor Tracking Info" actually do?

[DavidPike · Accepted solution]

For an existing feature layer with editor tracking enabled,  or first-time publishing a dataset with existing edit tracking fields (such as from an SDE Feature Class) -  it prevents those existing values being overwritten with your publisher details. 

I guess the logic is that you may wish to preserve those details historically, but not automatically continue to track edits unless specifically defined.