Swifty 4 Posted February 1, 2014 Share Posted February 1, 2014 About an hour ago, I updated a note that my wife and I use as our shared shopping list. I found the note empty, and added a couple of items, from my Windows client.About the same time, my wife found the shopping list empty, and added 10 items. As things stand now, an hour later, my update is visible on my Windows client, both our S4 phones, and my Galaxy TAB. There is no sign of my wife's 10 items anywhere, nor is there any sign of a conflict notification. According to my Windows client, the last update to the note came from my wife's account... What might have gone wrong? Well, one possibility is that my wife entered her 10 new items, then accidentally pressed some "undo" button. Is that likely? I don't even know if there is an "undo" mechanism. We now have a workaround. Although the notebook is shared, we each have our own shopping list in it, and we've agreed not to interfere with each other. It does seem to make a mockery of having a shared update notebook though. This is starting to remind me of the bad old days when my mail client would tell me than none of my mail items contained the word "hippopotamus" despite the fact that the email I was looking at contained that very word, and it was in plain sight. You get a slight ebb in confidence... Incidentally, if you wonder why I might have the word "hippopotamus" in my email, it is because I suggested to my users that they included that word whenever they were making test updates. It was the first word that popped into my mind when I wanted a word that was highly unlikely to be present in official IBM communications. I'd be able to recognise the test data from the live data. Then my product went international, and Africa was one of the highest take ups... Link to comment
BurgersNFries 2,407 Posted February 1, 2014 Share Posted February 1, 2014 About an hour ago, I updated a note that my wife and I use as our shared shopping list. I found the note empty, and added a couple of items, from my Windows client.About the same time, my wife found the shopping list empty, and added 10 items. As things stand now, an hour later, my update is visible on my Windows client, both our S4 phones, and my Galaxy TAB. There is no sign of my wife's 10 items anywhere, nor is there any sign of a conflict notification. According to my Windows client, the last update to the note came from my wife's account... What might have gone wrong? Well, one possibility is that my wife entered her 10 new items, then accidentally pressed some "undo" button. Is that likely? I don't even know if there is an "undo" mechanism. We now have a workaround. Although the notebook is shared, we each have our own shopping list in it, and we've agreed not to interfere with each other. It does seem to make a mockery of having a shared update notebook though. This is starting to remind me of the bad old days when my mail client would tell me than none of my mail items contained the word "hippopotamus" despite the fact that the email I was looking at contained that very word, and it was in plain sight. You get a slight ebb in confidence... Incidentally, if you wonder why I might have the word "hippopotamus" in my email, it is because I suggested to my users that they included that word whenever they were making test updates. It was the first word that popped into my mind when I wanted a word that was highly unlikely to be present in official IBM communications. I'd be able to recognise the test data from the live data. Then my product went international, and Africa was one of the highest take ups... Please read this thread: http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/20092-not-very-happy-right-now/ IIRC, note conflicts only happen when a note is updated from multiple computers/devices within a short period of time. I don't know what that time period is but maybe within a few minutes. Otherwise, it must assume the second update is intentional. It has been said before on this board many times that EN is not a good collaboration tool & that things such as grocery lists are better suited to an app designed for that. Link to comment
Swifty 4 Posted February 1, 2014 Author Share Posted February 1, 2014 About an hour ago, I updated a note that my wife and I use as our shared shopping list. I found the note empty, and added a couple of items, from my Windows client.About the same time, my wife found the shopping list empty, and added 10 items. As things stand now, an hour later, my update is visible on my Windows client, both our S4 phones, and my Galaxy TAB. There is no sign of my wife's 10 items anywhere, nor is there any sign of a conflict notification. According to my Windows client, the last update to the note came from my wife's account... What might have gone wrong? Well, one possibility is that my wife entered her 10 new items, then accidentally pressed some "undo" button. Is that likely? I don't even know if there is an "undo" mechanism. We now have a workaround. Although the notebook is shared, we each have our own shopping list in it, and we've agreed not to interfere with each other. It does seem to make a mockery of having a shared update notebook though. This is starting to remind me of the bad old days when my mail client would tell me than none of my mail items contained the word "hippopotamus" despite the fact that the email I was looking at contained that very word, and it was in plain sight. You get a slight ebb in confidence... Incidentally, if you wonder why I might have the word "hippopotamus" in my email, it is because I suggested to my users that they included that word whenever they were making test updates. It was the first word that popped into my mind when I wanted a word that was highly unlikely to be present in official IBM communications. I'd be able to recognise the test data from the live data. Then my product went international, and Africa was one of the highest take ups... Please read this thread: http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/20092-not-very-happy-right-now/ IIRC, note conflicts only happen when a note is updated from multiple computers/devices within a short period of time. I don't know what that time period is but maybe within a few minutes. Otherwise, it must assume the second update is intentional. It has been said before on this board many times that EN is not a good collaboration tool & that things such as grocery lists are better suited to an app designed for that. Since all the updates flow through the Evernote central server, it's relatively straightforward to reject any update which is based on a version of the note which no longer matches the current state of the note. I've actually implemented such an update locking mechanism, so I know that it's really easy to do. In our particular case, both my wife and I found the note to be empty (nothing left on our shopping list). We both added items. My items ended up in the data, my wife's items got lost. Presumably, my wife updated first, then my update overwrote hers. My update should have been flagged as a conflict, because it was based on an empty note, but the note wasn't empty when my update was applied; it contained my wife's update. Now, if this is what happened, then I'd just have to accept that the update locking/conflict recognition is flawed/missing. But there is a very curious wrinkle... the note was last updated by my wife, but the data in the note is the data put there by me. I cannot fathom how my wife could have made the most recent update, leaving the note content identical to what I'd added, without her ever seeing what I'd written (until she found her own addition missing). There's something very fishy going on here. It would be fascinating to know the sequence of events which led to this outcome. This is one reason why I loved my job... I owned the server. So I could log anything I wanted to log, which meant that I could trace any problem which arose, and fix it. It sometimes took me a long time (three years, to track down a bug which occurred only once a year on average) but I always got there in the end. Funnily enough, my "3 years to fix" bug was a data corruption caused by a tiny timing loophole in my locking mechanism! Link to comment
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