Snapshot - "the attached file could not be found"

JonEP
I have "automatically take snapshots" selected in my preferences. I recently used the "newspaper" symbol in the browser bar to enter a newspaper article (from the NYTimes)-- it populated the info nicely, but when I click on the snapshot I receive the message "the attached file could not be found". Same problem if I delete the snapshot, then browse to the page and "attach snapshot of current page" -- resulting attached snapshot can not be found...

Ideas, help?
Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    There is some odd incompatibility that I remember. If I'm not mistaken, for some odd reason snapshots fail (silently) on NYTimes.com when addblock is enabled - could that be it?
  • JonEP
    Could and indeed is it. How odd. Thanks!
  • areteichi
    I just discovered this issue as well, but not on NYT but on Asahi (the Japanese newspaper website). No snapshot was being captured when I clicked on the "Create New Item from Current Page" button. I was also able to circumvent this by temporarily disabling AdBlock Plus.

    The strange thing though is that there are some past articles of Asahi I had previously saved, whose snapshots Zotero had properly saved. I wonder if this has to do with a certain advertisement or script that is being displayed on the website and which generates some problem when it gets blocked by AdBlock.
  • areteichi
    edited October 1, 2011
    To follow up on my previous post, I figured out, by process of elimination, that the filter which was preventing Zotero from capturing a snapshot (on asahi.com in my case) is called "/common/ad." in AdBlock Plus.

    I only disabled that one filter (AdBlock still enabled in Firefox) and Zotero seems to work fine again. I'm not sure if this filter is the only one that conflicts with the Zotero's snapshot capturing feature, but I hope I can avoid this issue by simply leaving this filter disabled.

    UPDATE:
    With the NY Times article I tried, disabling the filter "/googleads." seems to help circumvent the issue.
  • dsquared
    I just encountered this problem myself. I understand that Zotero may not work with every Firefox add-on out there, but surely it is a sin of user interface design to indicate that a user's data has been saved -- when in fact is has not!

    Zotero really should indicate that it had a problem saving the snapshot.
  • adamsmith
    problem is - I don't think Zotero knows. It's a quirk of the webdump code that makes the snapshot. If Zotero was aware there was no snapshot, it wouldn't create an attachment at all.
  • dsquared
    But Zotero *does* know, in a way: when I later click "View Snapshot", it says that it can't find the file.

    I understand that this is a tricky thing to fix, but claiming to save something when you don't is really bad, and potentially awful PR. If someone tries Zotero, thinking that it will save all this content, but doesn't, they will not be happy.

    Also, the problem seems to be with a very popular add-on (Adblock), and not some subtle interaction between obscure add-ons; it seems reasonable for Zotero to play nicely with the quirks of popular add-ons.
  • adamsmith
    fair enough. Issue created:
    https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/10
  • dsquared
    Great! Thanks for your help, adamsmith. I hope this issue gets some developer attention soon.
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