Upgrade StorageZotero website not working consistently
Hello! I'm a librarian at a high school, and recently began using Zotero with a group of 20 students. We've set up a group in Zotero to collect our research, but every single time we try to use Zotero it kicks us off the site and says to retry in a couple minutes. I need to provide instruction on how to use the site, but either we can't get on the site or we get kicked off within minutes. This only happens with Zotero and hasn't occurred with any other sites we use. The site runs fine for me at home with no issues.
The IT department at our school mentioned that since we are all on the same wifi network we are all sending the same IP address to the Zotero site when trying to access it, even tho we each have our own accounts. Could this be the problem? Is there a solution I can explore? I'm at the point of having to select another tool for students, but had my heart set on using Zotero.
The IT department at our school mentioned that since we are all on the same wifi network we are all sending the same IP address to the Zotero site when trying to access it, even tho we each have our own accounts. Could this be the problem? Is there a solution I can explore? I'm at the point of having to select another tool for students, but had my heart set on using Zotero.
This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.
Once to group is set up and the students have joined, they should be able to do everything much more easily in the Firefox add-on or Zotero Standalone (whichever you chose to teach).
The three times we tried to use Zotero as a class the Firefox add-on gave us the error message I mentioned. The times we were able to get back in, it give us the same error message as soon as we clicked on anything on any links on the site.
There is
1) The Zotero website at zotero.org which works on any browser
2) Zotero for Firefox, an add-on for the Firefox browser and
3) Zotero Standalone, which can be connected to other browsers using the appropriate extension.
2) and 3) are basically functionally equivalent and the best reference/research tool out there. 1) is much, much less powerful and, imo, inferior to available web only tools such as RefMe or citeUlike.
The error you describe would only occur when using 1). Once installed, you don't need zotero.org for 2) and 3).
It's obviously your call, but I'd question whether Zotero is a good choice of tools if you can't use either 2) or 3). E.g. you can't use it in a Word processor, you can only create bibliographies with up to 25 items at once, you can't save webpage snapshots, you can't search properly, etc. etc.
None of that means the website should fail in the way it does, of course.
This is a bit of a disappointment, because I was under the impression that Zotero's website (option 1) would be a solid option for my students who did not have their own tech device, or couldn't bring there's to school, as they would still be able to access their saved info from home. :/
Thanks so much for your guidance and assistance!
Still would be good to get the performance issues of the site as of now fixed, though.
I think this started some time within the last year, after some type of update, but unfortunately don't recall very well.
Yes, the error message my students and I are receiving is "We're experiencing some problems. Please try again in a minute." This occurs all the time no matter where we are on the site. Then, when we try to get back in we'll be taken back to the page we were on and as soon as we click on something else we get timed out again.
Do you think it could be a random occurrence or is it possible we're confusing the site all coming from the same IP address? I never receive this error message when I use the Zotero website at home. Either way, it is super frustrating and I'm really hoping there is a work around.
Thank you both so much for trying to help me. I really, really appreciate it!
I do know that when I use my same laptop at home to access the Zotero website, I don't receive that error message.
Accessing from the same IP shouldn't matter.
The thing I find about the error screen is that it is immediate instead of after a pause for a time-out. At first this only happened to me when I was trying to reach the forums. When I gave it a thought I supposed that it was a sort of "too many connections" to the forums database error. However, as it has happened to me throughout the site, I don't know.
The error is not a generic error page but is customized to the Zotero site.
"Oops! We've had a little trouble getting that page for you. Please try again in a minute or two. Our apologies for the inconvenience."
This happens every time I access the Zotero website while on campus. It happens on any and all pages repeatedly.
I've only been using Zotero consistently the last couple weeks, so I don't know if this is a new problem, but does anyone have any news on when it will be fixed? I'm at the point where I don't think my class will be able to use it because it's unreliable.