Upgrade StoragePlease fix TLS certificate handling
We recently got a firewall doing TLS inspection, which requires trusting a new TLS certificate authority (CA) used by the firewall. Zotero, apparently being based on an ancient Firefox does not work with the standard mechanism of looking at certificates trusted by the system. (On a Mac, anyhow.) So there's a crazy workaround that involves multiple steps that no other app but Zotero needs to work correctly.
This would not be so bad if there were a checkbox in Zotero to accept this certificate, or this CA, or even to ignore certificates (perhaps for a single session). It would be painful but reasonably cautious if Zotero would indicate that it was refusing to download a requested document until you did the multi-step-hop.
Zotero does none of these things. It simply allows its small dialogue box -- which always spawns when you select "Add to My Library' -- to sit on the screen without indicating progress or error. And when you're really using that feature you're going through perhaps a long RSS feed of potential articles to download and you really don't need to pay attention to the details of that box since surely an error would be brought to your attention. (And in general, you just keep adding to your library and don't have to pay attention to the box as it expands and contracts as it does its job.)
So I just wasted a couple of hours going through a long RSS feed and marking about a dozen papers out of hundreds and adding them to my library... Except at the end none of them were added to my library. Nothing. No placeholder, no ability to recover the RSS feed where I was, no ability to see what papers I'd attempted to add to my library. :-(
This would not be so bad if there were a checkbox in Zotero to accept this certificate, or this CA, or even to ignore certificates (perhaps for a single session). It would be painful but reasonably cautious if Zotero would indicate that it was refusing to download a requested document until you did the multi-step-hop.
Zotero does none of these things. It simply allows its small dialogue box -- which always spawns when you select "Add to My Library' -- to sit on the screen without indicating progress or error. And when you're really using that feature you're going through perhaps a long RSS feed of potential articles to download and you really don't need to pay attention to the details of that box since surely an error would be brought to your attention. (And in general, you just keep adding to your library and don't have to pay attention to the box as it expands and contracts as it does its job.)
So I just wasted a couple of hours going through a long RSS feed and marking about a dozen papers out of hundreds and adding them to my library... Except at the end none of them were added to my library. Nothing. No placeholder, no ability to recover the RSS feed where I was, no ability to see what papers I'd attempted to add to my library. :-(
In any case, you seem to be referring specifically here to the feed feature. That's a pretty out-of-the-way feature, and we've never tested that with MITMed connections. We'll look into error feedback for it, but you're the first to report it.
Zotero tries to test the connection at startup to determine if a system proxy is being used and warn you (with an error icon in the toolbar) if it can't connect. Perhaps that's not happening with your system config. But you would generally also see an error in a much more visible feature, such as attachment downloads, syncing, Add Item by Identifier, or PDF metadata retrieval, well before you got to the feeds feature. For that matter, you shouldn't even be able to load or refresh a feed in the first place. So it's just very unlikely that this would come up for most people. Sorry for the wasted time, though.
I believe I've been able to refresh the RSS feed multiple times. (I was too embarrassed to mention that this seems to have occurred on multiple days, so I actually lost many, many hours of work.) Again, everything LOOKS pretty much normal: I click and click and a box appears for a while then disappears. It's too painful to jump to My Library to check and then to jump back to the RSS feed -- you lose your place and have to scroll back. And it's never NOT worked before. But I have no papers saved for the last month, which corresponds to about when we got the new firewall.
I've unfortunately tried the multi-step through Firefox multiple times and it does not work. Not sure why Firefox decided they wouldn't accept PEMs and wanted proprietary files and NSS to handle the job.
I guess I can add arXiv.org to the TLS exception list and just remember to not try to use Zotero on any other site. (95% of my papers come from arXiv, which has the enormous RSS feeds for popular topics like Machine Learning. It's a firehose.)
My RSS feed has no dates for the entries. That column is empty. I believe I've refreshed it at least once. I generally go through the RSS every Monday, but may have missed a couple with everything else happening. It was what it was this time, I did not manually refresh it.
None of my feeds (currently) have a date. I have not refreshed them since they at least show all of the articles they had a while back -- they're all marked as read, so it'll be a slog, but at least I might get lucky to find some of the articles that originally caught my eye.
It's possible that the feeds are from before the firewall was updated and have been sitting there a month. They include cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML, and stat.ME. (I never manually refresh, it just updates somehow.
In any case, I would generally recommend not ignoring prominent red exclamation marks… Again, all sorts of Zotero functionality would be broken in that state. I'm asking for a specific feed URL so that we can try to reproduce this. Again, we're seeing Date values — both in the middle column and the right-hand pane — for arXiv feeds.
Feeds in this form do:
http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=cat:stat.ML&start=0&max_results=99&sortBy=lastUpdatedDate&sortOrder=descending
That's a feed I have saved, with "stat.ML" substituted in. I'm not sure if it's possible to generate feeds like that from the current arXiv UI.