transferring ownership of a group account

slidberg

I recently transferred ownership of a group library I have been building (to the same person, but with a different account). The transfer has not been completed yet. What is this process usually like? Are there extra notifications I was supposed to have been receiving? I initiated the transfer 3 days ago and there has been no change to the account.

Thanks!

mark

I believe the person now has to go to the group page, where they will find a link to "accept ownership" or something along these lines. No notification is sent out. That procedure is waiting to be improved.

w80

somewhere in the forums there's a thread that explains exactly where to go to find the 'accept ownership transfer' link in the destination account. It's counterintuitive. I have to say, the Zotero gang are data geniuses, but I wish they'd get some input from an expert in user interface/experience. their icons aren't consistent with their metaphors, among other things, and the abovementioned group transfer process is awkward, at best. Any research/professional/academic zotero group is going to have to transfer ownership everytime the tech-forward youngster (associate, grad student, etc) moves on. Now that groups is a really terrific, fully functioning part of Z, this is going to come up a lot.

mark

Yeah, I think this holds particularly for the web functionality. For example, ever since group libraries (and online libraries in general) were introduced there have been threads pointing out various problems with the displays and all sorts of missing features (sorting? searching? choosing which columns to display? changing number of items displayed per page? documentation of the API?).

I get the sense that the web interface has not been a priority. Or at least the Z folks do not apply some principles of "agile development", such as "update early, update often". Who knows what the planned functionality looks like; and perhaps some of it works already behind the scenes. But we don't get to see any of it. Fundamentally, the user-facing web interfaces have not seen any changes since their first introduction except for the introduction of file storage (and even that interface has its problems as I've pointed out elsewhere).

mark

To substantiate that somewhat grudgy remark, here are some reported issues that are more than a year old for which we have seen no movement whatsoever:

* interface of online libraries can be improved on many counts (see also sortable tables request by Bruce)
* 'latest additions' in group libraries list items and attachments indiscriminately
* library feeds are very messy (include attachments and notes as well as top level items by default) (there is a feed api now but it seems to me that if feeds are offered in places where people expect being able to subscribe (like a collection or group library) such feeds should be cleaner by default)
* issue with CSS font stack

And a more recently filed issue:
* storage settings interface is confusing

These are just some threads I remember starting, there's bound to be more. This all is just to voice the feeling that we haven't seen much movement on improving the website for a while. This is holding me back from introducing colleagues to the group and online libraries functionalities.