Zotero hiding entire library

HDerksen · February 21, 2010

Today I was unpleasantly surprised that my Zotero library got completely deleted (on my computer - I did not dare to check my online database out of fear to clear that one as well). After working on my paper for a while and encountering the problem several times, I have been able to reproduce the effect. I also discovered that restarting Firefox/Zotero brings everything back to normal -so it guess it's an UI issue and not a library issue (?). Quite scary though.

1. On the left side I select a tag to display documents with that tag.
2. I select a random document from that list, and go to its tags options.
3. I delete one random tag (does not need to be the tag selected under 1.)
4. Voila, full library seems to be cleared on the computer.
5. Restart Firefox/Zotero: all back to normal.

Strange bug....

~HDerksen

anders_royce · February 21, 2010

Weird. I just reproduced this myself. Except I managed to make the library reappear simply by minimizing the tag picker (clicking on the "^.........^" toggle in the left pane).

dstillman · February 22, 2010

I've adjusted the title of this thread, since this is obviously just a UI issue and no data is being deleted.

I can't reproduce this. The only similar issue I can reproduce is if I select a tag with only one associated item and then remove the tag from that item—items in the middle pane are then hidden until a tag selector refresh (which can happen in a few ways, including toggling "Display all tags in this library" back and forth). I've created a ticket for this.

If you (or others) could do more testing and provide additional details on the original bug, that would be helpful.