"The attached file could not be found" message

briank
I'm having a problem in which I always get the following message when I attempt to open a snapshot of an article I've saved: "The attached file could not be found. It may have been moved or deleted outside of Zotero." I've searched for this in the forum but haven't seen the particular set of circumstances I have. First, I'm running Ubuntu 10.04LTS, Firefox 3.6.11, and Zotero 2.0.9 (with syncing turned off). This only started happening recently, after my switch from Windows to Linux. I copied the Zotero folders to the appropriate directory, and all my old articles showed up fine. New articles seem to save okay, but the snapshot actually doesn't. When I first discovered this, I thought there might be some conflict with the FF profile, but when I create a debug output and view the log, it's looking for the correct profile. Curiously, the article is saved fine -- everything but the actual html document. If, say, the main article is called "article.html," the resulting file in the Zotero storage folder will be named "article_1.html." What's more, it will only be 2 or 3 KB, when previously saved articles (that work properly) are all on the order of 70-100 KB. (Upon opening the misnamed html file, there might be a few lines of text at the top, but mostly blank space.) I thought perhaps an updated NoScript addon could be creating a conflict, but when I disabled that and restarted FF, I still have the snapshot problem. I'd appreciate any suggestions you might have to fix this . . .
  • dstillman
    Did you disable all other extensions? What's an example of a page you're trying to save?
  • briank
    Thanks for the tip, Dan. I did disable all extensions just now and soon found that the Zotero snapshots work fine with Adblock Plus (v1.2.2) disabled. So there must be a conflict there, though a quick search on Google and in the Adblock forum hasn't turned up anything yet. Nothing jumps out at me in the preferences settings of Adblock, either. Is this the first you've heard of it? I imagine Adblock is a pretty popular extension, so I'd be surprised if it hasn't happened before. I'll keep searching, but if you have any ideas please let me know. (Just to answer your other question, too, they've all be New York Times articles.)
  • dstillman
    There's been another report of this, but you're the first to narrow it down to AdBlock.

    We'll have to look into what exactly about the interaction is causing this. (For starters, Zotero uses WebPageDump for snapshot saving, so if you have a moment, install that and see if snapshots saved with that are affected as well.)
  • briank
    Dan, I just tried to install WebPageDump as you suggested, and it wouldn't because it says it's not compatible with FireFox 3.6.11.
  • adamsmith
    it's certainly not a general ad-block plus problem. I've been using ad-block plus with snapshots for a long time without any problems ever and considering how popular it is, I'm sure I'm not the only one. Could maybe be a specific setting in ad-block?
  • ajlyon
    I can confirm that I see the same behavior -- NYTimes snapshots aren't saved correctly with AdBlock enabled. Firefox 3.6.11 for Ubuntu, AdBlock 1.2.2, Zotero 2.1b1.
  • ajlyon
    This could conceivably be related to Firefox 3.6.11 -- a change that caused an interaction between Zotero and AdBlock?
  • dstillman
    The other report was 3.6.9.
  • ajlyon
    @Adamsmith: Are you not seeing this behaviour?
  • briank
    @adamsmith: I agree, it seems unlikely given how popular AdBlock is. But after disabling all extensions and testing a few one at a time, snapshots didn't work when AdBlock was enabled. To double-check, I disabled AdBlock and re-enabled all others; snapshots then functioned correctly.

    I wonder if it's a problem particular to the Ubuntu version of Firefox. Maybe Windows versions work fine, so the conflict hasn't been widely noted-? I'm new to Linux, but I know there's an add-on called "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications" that the Software Center describes as "various modifications for the Ubuntu default install of Firefox." The full information for my version of FF is 3.6.11 and "Mozilla FF for Ubuntu, canonical - 1.0" if that makes a difference. I might try setting up the same program and extension versions on my old Windows machine and see whether or not I get the same results.
  • adamsmith
    I'll do some more tests, but I'm on Ubuntu 10.04, too, with FF 3.6.10 and have never had problems with snapshots, so that might not be it, either. Could you send a links to a page that doesn't work for you so we can make sure we're on the same "page" - quite literally?
  • briank
    @adamsmith: Here's a random article from today's NYT that didn't work:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/world/middleeast/27saudi.html
  • adamsmith
    OK - that I can confirm - (now on FF 3.6.11) - it's limited to the NY Times (I tried a couple of other random sites and snapshots work fine) and it occurs both using the translator and the "create new item" button.

    I've submitted the process of scraping the above article as Debug
    Debug ID is D553086856.

    ScrapBook (which I thought uses WebDump, too) still works on those sites. I'll now try disabling adblock.

    To get it back to work, it's not necessary to disable Adblock in Firefox. It's sufficient to unblock the page (or nytimes.com entirely), reload the page and scraping will work correctly (which is very much viable as a work-around - but I'm concerned about people who don't notice).

    The latest correct scrape from NYTimes that I can confirm is from September 15th this year.
  • briank
    Thanks, adamsmith, for narrowing that down. It is a pretty easy work-around, as you say, but I do hope it gets put on the list for bug fixes in future versions. At least I can save things properly now. Thanks to all who responded -- you've helped me a great deal.
  • DenDen60
    I have the same problem and it does this on three disctincts computer, but when I go on my online library I can open it no problem.
  • dstillman
    DenDen60: This thread is about an issue with AdBlock. Unless you're using AdBlock, start a new thread.
  • DenDen60
    Dan, the thread is called : The attached file could not be found" message, and this is my problem and it only started a fews days ago so I think I am in the right thread.
  • adamsmith
    DenDen - if you're not using AdBlock and you're actually interested in getting help - start a new thread.
    Dan is trying to help you, it doesn't make sense to argue. (and the idea is to keep one technical problem per thread - unless you're having the exact same problem - NYT article snapshots using adblock - we'd want to address it in a separate thread).
  • fbennett
    @DenDen60: That's the title of the thread here, and that's the error message, true. The user who reported the "attached file could not be found" error message above (briank) found that the problem went away when AdBlock was disabled. Is that true in your case?

    If the problem persists after disabling AdBlock on one of your three machines, then your problem is separate from the one reported above, and in that case Dan suggests starting a new thread, just to keep the debugging discusssions clearly separated.

    If disabling AdBlock does solve the problem in your case, you're in the right place.
  • pdiasdasilva
    I had the same problem just now on a Mac OS X 10.5.8, FF 3.6.12, with Adblock, on a NY Times page, so the problem remains. adamsmith's solution worked perfectly (the second time, because I forgot to reload the page the first time, my bad). Thanks a lot!
  • Arjan
    I just noticed this problem as well, using:
    - Windows (XP)
    - Firefox 3.6.15
    - Zotero 2.1.1
    - Adblock Plus (1.3.3)

    So the problem is not limited to Linux and Mac. And disabling Adblock for nytimes.com works, but is of course annoying.
  • vadb
    I can confirm this with Firefox 4 as well:
    - Windows 7 (64)
    - Firefox 4.0.1
    - Zotero 2.1.7
    - Adblock Plus 1.3.8

    Snapshots work fine on other pages but nytimes.com needs Adblock disabled.
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