Experience in solving "Word could not communicate with Zotero"
I want to share my experience with Zotero Word and Connect not being able to connect to Zotero.
Turns out if the IPv4 loopback doesn't exist (happened to me after using some unrelated scripts), Zotero won't be able to connect to Word. On a Mac the fix is to add back the IPv4 loopback. Using:
sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0
That solved the problem.
Before this, I've tried everything: reinstalling Zotero; deleting and reinstalling the Zotero.dotm; creating a new macOS user account (because the setting persist over user accounts, creating a new one won't fix the problem); changing the port; and probably other efforts that I can't remember anymore.
Turns out if the IPv4 loopback doesn't exist (happened to me after using some unrelated scripts), Zotero won't be able to connect to Word. On a Mac the fix is to add back the IPv4 loopback. Using:
sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0
That solved the problem.
Before this, I've tried everything: reinstalling Zotero; deleting and reinstalling the Zotero.dotm; creating a new macOS user account (because the setting persist over user accounts, creating a new one won't fix the problem); changing the port; and probably other efforts that I can't remember anymore.
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dstillman Zotero TeamThere's a good chance simply rebooting would've fixed this. Not having the 127.0.0.1 alias set up is a severe misconfiguration that could break all sorts of things, but macOS should generally set it up on every boot.