"New Item" manual add

jachunt

Hi,

In future update, can the option of "Web Page" please be added to the "New Item" drop down menu (it is currently missing from the options, but does appear in the drop down menu in the document info section).

Running 7.0.8.

Thank you for your consideration

dstillman

See the Note here:

https://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero#manually_adding_items

jachunt

Hi dstillman,

That does not address the issue I am having. Pretty much every time I use Zotero, there seems to be a disconnect, and randomly I can no longer save anything from my browser. The only way to fix this is to close everything and restart. I'm on Mac Sequoia but this has been a consistent issue for at least the past four years.

Sometimes this disconnect happens after I have 20+ tabs open and I've been reading articles/websites trying to decide if I want to add them to my database or not. In order to fix the issue, like I said, I have to restart my computer, but I can't just close every tab without having that info saved somewhere (Zotero), meaning I have to manually add them in.

The issue: when manually adding, the "web page" option is missing from the drop down menu. I cannot always use the extension button in my browser.

Is it possible for this to be added in a future update?

Thank you.

dstillman

What browser? And what do you mean by "there seems to be a disconnect"?

If the Zotero Connector isn't working, that's what needs to be fixed — the solution isn't for you to start laboriously typing in metadata from webpages. Saving data from webpages automatically is the reason Zotero exists. That's the point of the linked section.

Also, browsers have been able to automatically reopen all tabs on restart for many, many years. If that's not happening, you should fix your browser settings.

jachunt

I would just like to have the "web page" added to the drop down to save a few steps for times when I do need to manually add something in. Is this impossible? I appreciate you trying to point me in directions you think are helpful, but this isn't answering my question.

The "disconnect" seems to be that Zotero is disconnecting randomly from my browser extensions, and no matter how many times I click the "save to Zotero" button in my browser, nothing saves. I don't know where the issue is stemming from at this point.

I have had this issue occur across multiple Apple products (2 x MBpro (2017, 2022), 1 x Air (2024), 1 x iMac) and PC desktops. It happens across Safari and Chrome consistently. I don't trust any computer to reopen every tab, because numerous times it has not worked and I've lost everything anyways (this is particularly an issue when using computers at the universities I attend, where when I have to log out and back in to my account, nothing is ever saved, which is a default setting from the university itself, so cannot be fixed).

Additionally, lots of times when I am saving it doesn't go in correctly, and I still have to manually add all the data anyways.

Don't get my intentions here wrong, I appreciate everything that Zotero is capable of, and I am a regular user of it. I have shared its capabilities with many of my classmates over the past 4+ years (I'm currently a masters student), and have given plenty of support to others when they are learning how to use it. But having this in the drop down menu is one of those small details that would be helpful.

dstillman

We're happy to help debug problems with the Connector. If you can reproduce it, you should report it at the time and let us help you. In general, see Troubleshooting Problems Saving to Zotero.

Restarting your computer isn't a normal troubleshooting step for Connector problems, and there's almost nothing that wouldn't be fixed by, at most, restarting your browser. So all the stuff about logging out/in is almost certainly irrelevant. And browsers can certainly restore tabs across a normal browser restart — that's been a basic feature in all browsers for a decade or more.

In any case, "Web Page" not being in the New Item menu is by design, as it explains in the section I linked to — it's not a "small detail" that we somehow overlooked. A future version will likely include it as an option in the menu along with some additional guidance about it not being a recommended workflow, but for now (and for many years past), that's been a way of communicating that you should almost never add webpages manually. In the meantime, you can always change the item type from the Info section if you need to. But if you're doing this regularly, you are wasting your time and not using Zotero as it's meant to be used, so you should let us help you have an actual functioning installation.

dstillman

(There's also just no world where manually entering details for 20+ tabs makes sense. Even if for some reason you absolutely had to restart your computer, it would be much faster to copy the URLs to a text field or Zotero note, restart your computer (or even just open another browser), and save them properly with the Zotero Connector at that point.)

jachunt

Wow, your judgement and lack of understanding that some people do things differently is quite sad.

dstillman

I'm not sure what you're looking for here? You asked a question. I linked to the simple, documented answer. It's been this way for many years and isn't going to change because you asked for it just now. Other people have obviously asked about this before — that's why the documentation section exists.

Zotero exists in large part to save people time — to make tedious, onerous tasks much easier — and so we design it to do so and try to avoid encouraging workflows that we think are bad uses of people's time. The Zotero Connector is one of the main components of that. "I think your time is too valuable to manually type in metadata for 20 webpages" is a mark of respect, not judgment. If you want to use it some other way, you can do so, but we're here to help people do research, not help them waste their time.