Something in Zotero not working correctly for you? Here are some steps you can take to help us find and fix bugs.
1. If you haven't yet, follow steps 1 through 4 on the Getting Help page for searching through documentation and the forums.
2. If you think you've found a bug, check the Actions menu (
) in the Zotero toolbar, before restarting Firefox, for the status of the “Report Errors…” menu option. If a potential Zotero error has occurred, “Report Errors…” will appear in black; otherwise, it will appear in gray and won't be selectable. If it is active, you can first use the error reporting wizard to submit an error report and then post the Report ID you received to the forums. (We don't read error reports sent via Report Errors unless there's a forum post pointing to them.) Not all problems will show up in the wizard, and not all errors that show up in the wizard will necessarily be related to Zotero, but it's the first thing to try when encountering a problem.
3. Whether or not you can use the error reporting wizard, the most important thing you can do to help us fix the problem is to get it to happen again: if you can provide us with steps to consistently reproduce the problem, we can almost certainly fix it quickly or tell you how to fix it. Note that after a problem occurs, other things in Zotero may temporarily break, so it's important to restart Firefox and try to repeat what you did before it occurred. Post a message to the forums with the exact steps you took to reproduce the problem (or, if you're not able to, with what you were doing when the problem first occurred), what happened, and what you expected to happen. Be sure to list, in order, any buttons or other interface elements that you clicked on, and include exact error messages or other relevant text that you see on-screen. If you aren't able to include a Report ID, it's also helpful to mention your Zotero version, Firefox version, and operating system.
Reporting Startup Errors
For serious problems that prevent you from using the reporting wizard—such as the Zotero pane not opening at all—we may need more information:
1. First, make sure JavaScript error logging in Firefox is enabled by going to the special Firefox URL about:config, typing 'showInConsole' into the Filter: field, and making sure javascript.options.showInConsole is set to true. (You can toggle the setting by double-clicking on the row.)1)
2. Restart Firefox.
3. Go to the Tools menu and select Error Console. In the new window that pops up, click Errors to view only important messages.
4. Look in the console for lines that contain a URL beginning with “chrome://zotero/…” or a message without a URL. (You can ignore any lines with URLs from other websites.) For each line, click on the pink background, go to the Firefox Edit menu and select Copy (or hit Cmd-C (Mac) or Ctrl-C (Win)), and paste the message into your forum post. If you're experiencing a startup error and you don't see any errors in the console mentioning Zotero, you may need to delete compreg.dat and xpti.dat from your Firefox profile directory, restart Firefox, and check the console again.
With any luck, this will give us enough information to identify the problem.
javascript.options.showInConsole to false.