Entire chapter inadvertently replaced with text from another chapter

Question

When moving from one chapter to another after edits were made, and “yes” was clicked in response to PT8 prompt to save changes, the text of the previous chapter was copied into the chapter just opened, completely replacing its text.

I am unable to reproduce the problem, but I have seen it happen at least three times in two different projects on two separate machines. I submitted a bug report, but ICAP Support needs more data to diagnose it. Wondering if anyone else has experienced this?

Answer 1

Ok, I just had this happen to me for the first time.
I finished a chapter, saved it, and moved to the next chapter. As I was starting the new chapter, I scrolled up in Logos to look at the end of the chapter I had just finished, and when I did so, it dragged Paratext to the end of the previous chapter as well. A message popped up saying that the chapter had changed from 48 verses to 1, and asked me if I really wanted the change. So in this case, it definitely occurred when another program dragged Paratext along.
Another item which might be important to note, there were unsaved changes in the new chapter I was working on, and when I said that I wanted to save those changes, it saved them, but also put the material from that chapter into the previous chapter.
I would like to see Paratext have an option to only send (and not receive) references, as usually I don’t want the passage I am working on in Paratext to change on me. However, I don’t know how easy it would be to implement something like that.

Comments

We have still been unable to reproduce this issue. However, we think we may have some clues in someone’s log file.

Can anyone confirm or deny that they have seen this when scrolling multiple (more than one other) applications with Paratext 8.0 (e.g. Have Logos and PT7 open at the same time with PT8)?

---

In my case, only Paratext 8 and Logos were involved.(there is a possibility that TW Folio edition may have been open, but if so, it was set to only receive references)

---

I had Paratext 8 report that 24 verses were deleted and was I sure I wanted to save. I said “No!”. I believe I had 7 and 8 both open. Fortunately automatic save changes was off. I compared it to the history and didn’t see any difference.
Sorry, not much info.

Answer 2

I haven’t run into that issue personally, but one person I help did. It happened several times to him, but we couldn’t reproduce the problem on demand.
From his recollection of what happened, it only occurred when he was automatically scrolling with Logos, and changed to a different passage in Logos, and Paratext attempted to go to that passage.
Not sure if that helps in the diagnosis or not.

Comments

Perhaps it does; thanks! We typically have PT7 alongside PT8, so it is possible that the change in chapter was initiated in PT7 and PT8 was responding to that. We will pay attention to this variable if/when the problem occurs again.

Answer 3

We have seen it happen twice when only PT7 and PT8 were scrolling together. In the other case, I believe TW and TNE (Translation Notes Editor) were also open.

Answer 4

I am new the Paratext Supporter site. We encountered this problem a week ago while working with our translation team. My wife’s computer had editing rights for Hebrews. She had just finished chapter 9 and then she did a send / receive and Paratext 8 overwrote chapters 5,6, and 13 and all of Jude with chapter 9. She was also BART and Paratext 7.5 and was sync’d with BART 5.5.1. I was able to recover everything except the most recent work on Hebrews 9 by changing the editing rights to my account (I am the administrator). However, on my wife’s computer, when we did a send/receive to change the editing rights to my computer, hers would not recognize the change. And Paratext 8 would not recognize that there were now two computers with editing rights to the same document. Today, while working on the same material (we were able to get things sorted out with help from the Paratext help people) I noticed that my wife had done a Search on the day the corruption took place, and the hits from the search were on the chapters that were overwritten–chapters 5 and 6 especially. So I am wondering if there is a bug in the Search engine.

Answer 5

One of the teams I am supporting here in the Philippines has reported that they have seen entire chapters being randomly replaced by chapters from somewhere else (sometimes even from a different book) about 6 times now, so they are starting to get apprehensive about using Paratext 8. They never experienced anything like that with Paratext 7.

Is any progress being made on identifying the cause of this problem and fixing it?

Answer 6

We fixed a potential problem by looking at the code and seeing how it might happen, but we have been completely unable to reproduce the problem in our test lab. This means that until someone says “if I do step 1, and then step 2, and then step 3, then my chapter gets overwritten” (i.e. a set of steps to reproduce it), there’s not much more we can do.

EDIT: Our potential fix went into 8.0.100.36, so it would definitely be worth knowing if someone gets the problem using that version or later.