Why did my Send/Receive results show that I had made "Unspecified" changes in a lot of projects?

Question

I just did a Send/Receive. I was initially surprised at the high number of "edited" projects. When the results screen appeared, it said that I had made "Unspecified" changes on nearly every project on which I have ever had Consultant permissions. It looked like many other users had, as well - including in some projects that have been completed/published, so are all but inactive. I'm including a screen grab where it showed that I'd made "Unspecified" changes, even though I have not worked with that language project in over a year. The other users on the project had similar notations. (Langauge name and another user's name crossed out for sensitivity/privacy.)

What could cause this? Is this a known issue, or could it be something serious?

Comments

I just noticed the same. "Unspecified" changes in many projects, I think in all the project where I have the Consultant, Translator or Administrator role. And so did other users - my guess is, all the users with these roles who did a S&R during the past half day or so.

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I have been able to do a brief investigation of some of these reports. In one case, the file called "unique.id" was changed several times in the last few hours, in another case it was the file "license.json". The developers have been notified.
My assessment is these files are secondary, things only Paratext "cares about", so the heart of the project data is still OK.

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I checked with the registry developers and there was some recent data cleanup that has caused some changes to the license.json file. The changes don't effect status of the license, but Paratext is saving the changed file which causes the project to look like it has changes.

As Steve noted, the files listed as "Unspecified" are not files that users edit.

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Good to know! Thank you so much.

Answer 1

I've also seen this behavior through the day today. I just sent an Error Report on it.

Answer 2

The same thing happened to me with all my projects. So far, I have only done send/receive for two projects. With both, the only change is in the file license.json and the change is the removal of the following line:

"expiresAt": null,

Other than that, no text is lost or changed. I hope the developers will give a more detailed explanation.