Shared Username

Question

Just found out one team has only one registered user. They all use it, it seems. sigh… They say they have been this way for a while without any “issues”.

So they will have no history of who did what, and the Project plan will be very limited since it helps you assign/track who does the different tasks. How else does this affect them?

Beyond the obvious “don’t do this”, I want to be able to give them clear reasons.

Thanks

Answer 1

Nope, there doesn’t appear to be any breach of our ToS. This may change in the future, but for now, it should be fine - given the restrictions on determining who did what, etc. you mentioned.

However, we still strongly encourage everyone on a project to register.

Comments

In PT7 I was told sharing a username on multiple computers would cause more conflicts, but I was never given a reason why this was so. Maybe it wasn’t true.

Could make it more difficult to resolve conflicts in the text since they are all by the same “user”?

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Conflicts are caused when two people edit the same text or verse. The conflict is because you don’t know which text should take precedence. This can be a disaster if it fits in long enough. When you have different user names, paratext can prevent the different
users from editing the same text because you assign different book, or even different chapter, editing privileges to different users. If the team were totally consistent in never working in the same books and always doing send receive before and after working,
you might be able to prevent most conflicts, but there are times, like when correcting spelling or biblical terms or even basic checking errors when it is very hard to resist the temptation to fix all the errors and accidents do happen.

Since you are doubting whether more conflicts will actually occur (and yes they really should be occurring more), it occurs to me that paratext might not always be recognizing the duplicate editing of the same text as a conflict if it’s done with the same user
name. You should deliberately test that because if a conflict wasn’t flagged in that situation, you could be experiencing users overwriting each other’s edits without knowing it and that would be quite a problem. You could only find hints of that by studying
the history.

As for correcting conflicts that do get flagged, the difficulty in correcting them will lie in the fact that you can’t easily differentiate between the actions of two people and so it can be hard to decide which choice should take precedence.

Blessings Shegnada

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Shegnada:

it occurs to me that paratext might not always be recognizing the duplicate editing of the same text as a conflict if it’s done with the same user name.

Paratext will flag it as a conflict even if it’s done by the same username. That shouldn’t be an issue.

Shegnada:

As for correcting conflicts that do get flagged, the difficulty in correcting them will lie in the fact that you can’t easily differentiate between the actions of two people and so it can be hard to decide which choice should take precedence.

In PT8, you should be able to see the changes done by both users inside the conflict note.

Answer 2

Just to clarify, are they using the same user on multiple machines, or are they all using the same machine as well?

Comments

My understanding, via email, is multiple systems with a single user registration.

Answer 3

Well, we can’t think of any technical reasons not to do it besides what you listed.

However, they might be in violation of some Terms of Service. I’m looking into that.

Comments

Ok. Please let me know.