Disappearing collection and subcollection name change in group library

Philippedodin

Hello,
A small research group with whom I'm working experienced a troubling problem with their group library. One collection with all subcollections disappeared (the references are still available in the unfiled items section but just to filed them back would take a large amount of time). They all confirmed to me that they didn't make a manual deletion of the collection. I would tend to believe them because, at the same time, 3 subcollections were renamed (only the numerical portion of their name) and none of them would have made a name change by mistake especially because it's part of a classification that they desperately needed to retrieve their large quantity of references. I’m extremely puzzled with that, especially since I convinced them to use Zotero in the first place. I’m willing to give all the necessary information for any verification.
Thank you in advance

dstillman

There's not really any way for this to happen on its own, so somebody with access to the group would had to have done it. Perhaps someone with access to the group left their Zotero login credentials on a public computer? The name change, in particular, sounds pretty clearly like human intervention of some sort.

We don't keep detailed records of who makes changes in groups, so I'm afraid we're not really able to tell you much more than that, but if you tell me the first letter of the group name and the approximate date this happened I can take a look.

Philippedodin

Thank you very much for your quick reply. I would also tend to agree it really seems a person problem more than a computer one but as I explained, they would not make this kind of changes and our computers are not public (but maybe you're right and someone's not telling the whole thuth!). So the group name starts with a "D" and the problem occured March 6th around noon Eastern time. The name change was of this kind "E.03.08.03-something" to "E.04.12.03-something" for 4 different subcollections. The 03.08 was changed to 04.12 on all of those.

Philippedodin

The problem reappared today and we finally understand what happened. The deletion was in fact an involuntary one but the biggest issue is that the person who experienced this problem does not have any warning message before the collection is deleted. She can inadvertedly delete any collection or subcollection without any warning. Is there any way to correct that (javascript is activated in her firefox)?

adamsmith

Are you sure about that? I wouldn't know of any way of getting rid of the warning prompt ("Are you sure you want to delete the Selected Collection").
Is she using the most recent version of Zotero?
If so, could you provide a debug ID output for her deleting any collection? Obviously this is only relevant if there is no prompt in that case:
http://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output

Philippedodin

The person reinstalled Firefox and Zotero before I could get there to make any test in person, and it seems everything is working fine now. I will continue to monitor this group and if the problem reappears I'll provide a debug ID. Thank you for your quick and accurate replies.

rob.sayre

This problem has happened to me as well--I'll try the reinstall of Firefox and Zotero, but the problem described above is not unique those users/groups.