Unable to add new user when internet connection is absent or unreliable

Question

I have been trying to add a new user to a back translation project and I keep being told things like this:

registration name not found.png790×132 6.35 KB

Registration Name xxxxxx not found. Only numbers, letters without diacritics, spaces, periods, hyphens and underscores are allowed in Registration Names.

We know the names are right. In one case I tried removing someone and then adding them back again with exactly the same spelling.

Is the problem that we’re not allowed to add new users unless we have a reasonable connection to the internet?

UPDATE: This confusing error only affects back translation or unregistered projects. Standard translation projects get a more overt error message about being unable to contact the Registry server.

Answer 1

I guess the thing is it would be nice if this restriction is unavoidable, for the error message to be more clearly about the lack of internet access. Otherwise we run around trying to work out what is wrong with names that otherwise seem fine.

But it would be even better for our folks who live in the countryside if admins could add users and send/receive by USB rather than having to do it by internet. The situation came up because a new worker needs to be added to a project and the administrator who has visited them doesn’t have internet access where they are.

Us supporters and trainers need to know whether this is a permanent design decision, because it will shape how projects are administered. But is this what Guest Users are for? If so, it’s rather unfortunate that Guest Users can only be added if you have forbidden internet access for Paratext.

Comments

So looking at the code, it is definitely a bug. Paratext does not seem to differentiate between being unable to contact the Registry server and the user not being found. This is the reason the message makes no sense. Could you report this via Help > Report a Problem?

rowbory:

But is this what Guest Users are for?

Yes, this is supposed to be what Guest Users are for. Unfortunately, if you have intermittent internet access, Paratext may be unable to detect that and will not show the Add Guest User option (because the check for internet access may succeed while the adding of the user might fail).

---

I already did yesterday. It would appear to be case 57878: https://paratext.fogbugz.com/default.asp?57878_bdgnlgk2a8i5b2j3 though I don’t see all the detail there that I submitted directly through Paratext.

My colleague said it would just be nice to know that the problem is the lack of internet connection rather than the spelling of the name. We do know that now and we also now know that you can’t add users unless you’re currently connected to the internet.

---

What do you mean by purely cosmetic? It isn’t possible to add new users when not connected to the internet.

---

OK. I see. My experience was that after the error message it has failed to add the user at all. I didn’t know you could add unverified users, but possibly that’s more of the guest user issue.

Interestingly I find that standard translation projects and back translations (linked projects) behave quite differently in a number of ways.

1. When I’m not connected to the internet and open the Users… dialog then the standard project gives me this message: Unable to access the registry server and it disables the Add User… button. The Back translation project doesn’t complain or disable the Add User… button. It just fails.
2. In the Standard Project Users… dialog box the non-PT8 users are marked in Red, but in the back translation project Users… dialog that message is absent.
3. You can’t add guest users to a back translation project unless they are already users on the main project.
4. Unregistered projects behave the same way as Back Translation projects. So maybe the differences in behaviour for the Users… dialog is all about whether the project is independently registered or not, since back translation projects inherit the registration of their parent project. The only difference is that I CAN add a guest user to an unregistered project, but that’s not possible in a back translation project unless the person is already registered in the parent project.

As an aside, you don’t need to restart paratext after choosing to Disable ALL internet access to enable the Add Guest User button. This makes it slightly less annoying.

Answer 2

Which version of Paratext?

Comments

8.0.100.39 and also .38 and .32

Answer 3

I am trying to support a colleague with a very similar problem. He tells me he has added a user to his project, which is confidential. He managed to do this on his computer (a Mac) which he managed to connect to the internet for this purpose via his phone’s hotspot.
He got someone else from icap (Brian Renes) to verify for him that the user is indeed listed on the list of users online (though I confess I can’t see that user in the list I see, possibly because the project is marked confidential and thus not visible in the list of registered projects – perhaps that means its users are invisible as well).
But here is my colleague’s problem: he cannot get the new user’s computer to connect to his phone’s hotspot and so he can’t get him to pick up the project by S/R from the internet. So he did S/R from his own computer to a pendrive after registering the user successfully and then attempted to give the project to the new user by S/R from that pendrive. He says, he gets an error message that, User xxx isn’t associated with a project.
So how can my colleague give the project to this new user and set him up on S/R, if S/R via the pendrive doesn’t work, despite the fact that both project and users are registered online?
Is this the same bug? Or is there something he can do to make it work?