Citation style modifications overwritten by zotero - months of modifications lost

fabmue
Hi,

I am a bit in a distress situation because Zotero has eaten up my citation style modifications compelled in days of work.

I used this style http://www.zotero.org/styles/juristische-zitierweise-offentliches-recht and did numerous modifications to it within Zotero. Now that style got updated on 18th of April and all my modifications are gone. Those modifications were made over the course of months and were quiet a lot of work. I am totally unable to reconstruct the changes I made, and building them again each time something does not fit my needs would significantly kill my PhD-progress. Hopefully there is a way to save me from loosing weeks of work.

I am disappointed that those files get overwritten with no questions asked if modifications were made!

Kind regards,
Fabian
  • dstillman
    Sorry to hear that, but this is explicitly mentioned in the style-editing instructions:

    https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step#change_the_style_title_and_id

    Zotero has to keep its installed styles up to date and has no way of knowing that you edited the style if you don't change the id.
  • fabmue
    Sadly that does not save me from crying... Wouldn't it be a better option to put the 'old' files in such cases into the bin? Or mark the style as changed? Because Zotero can know about that in case you edit from within Zotero.
  • dstillman
    These are just files within Zotero's data directory — they're managed by the app, and it needs to keep them updated automatically as styles change. You can't overwrite an installed style and be surprised when the app updates it.

    But we have an open ticket to add an Install button to the Style Editor that would warn if the id and title haven't been changed.
  • fabmue
    Sorry, I really appreciate your hard work for the project, but I have to strongly disagree on that: Of course you can be surprised. The app has a style editor, you can't expect that changes you made within the app get overwritten without any notice. From a UX-point of view this is unexprected behavior.
  • dstillman
    edited April 29, 2024
    The fact that it's a built-in style editor isn't really relevant. You're clicking Save As, which opens up a standard OS file picker, and choosing to overwrite a file within the Zotero data directory. You could do the same with a text editor outside of Zotero. Don't edit an app's internal files if you don't understand how they work.

    And again, we mention this very prominently in the style-editing instructions.

    Anyway, there's no point in arguing about this. As I say, we have an open ticket to add an Install button, which will warn if the id hasn't been changed, and we can show the same warning if someone manually navigates to the data directory from Save As. There's really nothing else to say on this.
  • adamsmith
    FWIW, if you have good versioned back-ups, you might be able to find an old version of the file in your pre-April 18th back-up.
  • icu2022
    Keeping installed styles up to date is a default strategy of these office softwares. Microsoft 365 would overwrite all the styles you changed in Normal.dotm if you had not save them in your own document as a new .dotm file.
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