Suggestion for add-user-to-project window

Question

Project Admins don't always have their team members' precise Paratext names handy. Would it be possible to add a drop-down list in the window where one typically types the user's Paratext name to add a user to a project? I would think this list could be populated by all users belonging to the same organization that the project itself belongs to. This wouldn't include all possible users, of course, but it would cover many use cases without "leaking" irrelevant Paratext names to any old project Administrator. And the Admin could still type a name free-hand if they need to add someone who's outside of the relevant organization.

Answer 1

The best way to request new features for Paratext is to use the "Give Feedback" menu under Help in Parartext.

One of the most important aspects of project sharing is communication. Given that the administrator should communicate with the team members about the project it should be possible to ask for user names. Paratext does a pretty good job of guessing if there is a name that is close, but the best way to be sure of the user names is to ask the users.

Comments

Thank you for the suggestion. I've done that now.

I am in a situation where myself and others are project admins for multiple projects. We are not often in close physical proximity to the users whose names we need, and these users are not proficient with computers, so it's quite a hill to climb to 1) communicate with the users about needing their PT names, 2) remind them how to find it in the PT Help menu, 3) get them to reliably copy/paste or type it into a message (e.g. email), 4) get them to send the message.

What usually happens instead is that someone else (a go-between) gets the users' full names and sends them to me, then I try various combinations of First Last Middle, Last First Middle, etc. until the Registry website proposes a list of names that includes the right name. This doesn't work in the PT desktop app, because it has to first accept the input, then it will propose a single name (which is usually wrong the first time). There it's very much a guessing game.

In addition, neither the spelling of names nor the order of names is very standardized here, and Paratext is not that great in my experience at overcoming "misspelled" or "misordered" names. I am a very tech-savvy user, and I find workarounds. But this is not an efficient workflow for other project Admins who are much less patient and tech-savvy than I am, and who are not familiar with using the Registry site. They end up asking me to do it because they aren't able to make it work. This is why I'm proposing what I see as a streamlined option.