Project Notes suddenly all turn to Unresolved and Unread state

Question

Hi, I’m helping a project (containing OT and NT) and they recently noticed that after a Send/Receive all Project Notes turned to “Unresolved” state. They have 14,000+ notes, it will not be feasible for the project to manually resolve historical ones. Has anyone run into this kind of situation? This problem got propagated to all the users that did Send/Receive. I looked in Project History, and this event doesn’t seem to be recorded. The project is using Paratext 7.4.

Reverting back to a date in the past seems like a feasible option, but will this fix the issue (i.e. does this affect only the text or also the notes too)? We aren’t sure at what date this occurred, mostly likely in May or June of this year. I was thinking about a script that could run through the comments.xml and close from a certain date, but I don’t see any nodes that when edited trigger a note to be resolved in Paratext.

Thanks,

Stevan Vanderwerf
Language Technology Consultant Eurasia - FCH

Answer 1

anon659920:

they recently noticed that after a Send/Receive all Project Notes turned to “Unresolved” state.

Can you give us the name of the project (i.e. if it’s not sensitive) so we can look and see what happened?

I would suggest you not do anything until we’ve figured out what happened (to make sure the problem isn’t made worse or another problem isn’t created).

Comments

Thanks,
Project name is _Tur_WB. I don’t know a lot about it, other than I’m in the same city as admin and occasionally pop in his office to do some tech help. I’m also not on the project’s Send/Receive. But I can be contact person for them.

I don’t believe that a project has been recently restored from a backup, I will check with the project and see. I’m adding @anon180868 into the conversation as I believe she has admin privileges on the project.

Thanks for your help in helping us figure out what went wrong.

Stevan

Answer 2

I would report this via the Paratext Help system. They are very helpful.

Blessings,

Shegnada J.

Language Technology & Publishing Coordinator, SIL Nigeria

Complex Script Layout Specialist, GPS Dallas

Skype: Shegnada.james.

([Phone Removed]

Answer 3

Stevan,

One of the ways this can happen is if someone restores the files from a backup. This can happen if someone gets a new computer or for some other reason decides to restore from the backup. The notes would be restored to their status when the backup was made.

Here are a few thoughts:

1. If you can look at the comments…xml files in the project directory and restore one of the comments…bak files to replace the file that did the unresolving
   In my case I have a backup with today’s date and the main .xml file is now dated from a month ago. This shows me that the backup was restored to a previous date. If I rename the .xml file (I use .xmlold) and make the .bak file the .xml then when I open Paratext I find that files that were unresolved have again been resolved (or at least it seems like it).
   This is pretty iffy.

2. You can rather quickly resolve notes by opening the notes window (File > Open Notes), sorting by date, expanding all of the notes and then resolving them.

Answer 4

This happened to one of our projects. One of the users’ notes file got corrupted, therefore all the notes she had resolved became unresolved. I restored that file from a backup and all the notes were resolved again.

Comments

So I’ve looked at your project. It looks like the Comments_M. Ali Simsek.xml file was deleted on Brian McLemore’s machine on 2017-05-30 (probably because it got corrupted somehow). When this was pushed to the other users, a new file was created on M. Ali Simsek’s machine containing only one new note (all the rest of his/her notes were removed).

Unfortunately, since that was a while ago, work has continued on the project and M. Ali Simsek has made many new notes following the deletion. I created a file containing the new notes (as of 2017-07-03) and the notes that were deleted. Someone will need to download the file and replace the file in the project with it and do a S/R (note that the file is 6.4MB). It should be replaced in the project ASAP by someone other than M. Ali Simsek to make sure more notes created by M. Ali Simsek are not lost.

Answer 5

Thank you so much for your help resolving this issue. I was informed that it fixed the problem!