Data loss: verse bridging error

Question

On May 4, when I did a send/receive, I got the following Conflict note on Acts 18:0:

Changes made to a chapter could not be merged because verse bridging was different.
Red/Green Highlight corresponds to Older/Newer text
The changes that Paratext REJECTED:

However, there was nothing else in the note, so I just resolved it.

Today, the team I’m working with sent me a bunch of responses to notes and revisions that I made on April 26, saying that the revisions I claimed to have made aren’t in the text. And they’re right. I have to go back to April 27 in the Compare Texts tool in order to see the edits that I made. I am now copying and pasting the previous edits back into the text.

What might have caused this?

RickNivens

Answer 1

Verse bridging refers to putting in a verse range, eg \v 1-4.

If there is a conflict and one of the conflicting versions adds a verse range where there was not one before, or removes a verse range that was there before, Paratext can’t figure out where that version should be shown, so it gets discarded.

Was there a change in verse ranges in the revision that got lost?

Comments

Yes, actually there were two. On April 27, I changed
\v 9-10 …
to
\v 9 … \v 10 …
And this is one of the changes that was lost. Also an edit in v.10 that I made on April 26 was lost.

On April 25, I changed
\v 24-26 …
to
\v 24-25 …
\v26 …
And that one was not lost.

But in addition, changes that I made to verses 3 and 13 on April 26 were lost.

---

So, why were the changes in verses 3 and 13 lost? Is this a bug?

Answer 2

Assuming that by “lost” you mean that there was a conflict with another user and your changes were lost, then that is normal. Paratext looks at the changes done by each user and attempts to choose the best one to keep (usually this is just the person who made the most changes to the text).

However, if you did not get conflict notes created for those lost changes, then we probably need to check out your project to see what happened.

Comments

The only conflict note I got was for Acts 18:0, and as I said it didn’t show the accepted or rejected text. Here it is (as it looks after I resolved it):

image.png864×378 64.7 KB

I was only able to find what text had been lost by using Compare Versions. And it wasn’t just in 18:0.

Answer 3

Admittedly, the conflict note message was badly worded, but your data loss was caused by your changes to the verse bridging. That conflict note that you resolved meant that, due to the verse bridging differences, the whole chapter was not merged. In this case, the chapter was changed to be that of Helena’s since she had made more changes to the chapter.

Answer 4

So, in such cases, would it be impossible for Paratext to display the accepted and rejected changes for the whole chapter? Not having this did cause some confusion for our team, because I had no idea that several notes that I had written about the revised text made no sense since my teammates couldn’t see the revised text because it had reverted to Helena’s previous version.

Comments

I found this error in a project I am working in and could not figure out what was wrong. This topic was helpful for finding out the problem, but could this information be added to the help files so it can be found off line too?
Thanks!
nomadic+consultant