Question about notes

Gary Foster
Gary Foster Member Posts: 21 ✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

Like most people, I like to make notes as I'm reading. I don't really understand how the community notes interacts with my locally stored notes though.

I have a small family faithlife group. I'd like to share my notes with them, however I'm kind of worried about what happens to my notes when I'm either offline or if something should happen to faithlife. I'm loathe to store all my notes as community notes since I would hate to lose access to them.

If I make a note and share it as a community note, is it still available to me when I am not online? Is a copy stored locally? In addition, can I share the same note to different groups without making a second copy of the note?

Thanks!

Comments

  • Gary Foster
    Gary Foster Member Posts: 21 ✭✭

    Another question, is there an easy way to convert a private passage note into a community note? I've tried cutting and pasting, but whenever I paste into the community note text box it crashes logos.

  • David A Egolf
    David A Egolf Member Posts: 798 ✭✭

    Hi Gary,

    I participate in several Faithlife groups for various purposes.  We also share notes and other documents.  However, until you posed this question I hadn't noticed that we had not resorted to the Faithlife community notes.  So, having never used the feature, I cannot talk to it.

    However, my associates have been quite happy with the shared documents facility.  The steps would be:

    1. Create the notes file you wish to share.
    2. Visit: documents.logos.com (while you are logged onto Logos.com on your browser) to see a list of all your Logos documents
    3. Locate the desired notes file or many other types of documents
    4. Hover around the desired notes file until the "Actions" control shows on the right.
    5. Choose between Collaborate and Publish.
    6. Select the Group(s) which you wish to get access to this document.  Documents can be Published to multiple groups while only one group at a time can participate in a collaboration.
    7. The shared document will be listed on the list on the Documents tab for the group.
    8. Members can elect to subscribe to the document and should be informed of its existence. (Faithlife may send an email)

    Publishing makes a static snapshot of the document available to those in the group.  The sharing members will not be able to update the document and they will not see your updates as you type, but they will be able to acquire fresh snapshots as long as the document remains Published.  I'm not sure, but I believe your updates will be available merely by the group members performing the document Refresh operation.  Otherwise, you would have to republish changes, which I do not think is necessary. (Anyone reading this who knows should provide the actual behavior.) I also do not know if the group members get a "read only" version or if they may be able to make private updates.  If they make private updates, then these changes might be lost if they choose to later "Refresh" the document in order to see your newest changes. (Again, anyone who knows how this will work should chime in!  Otherwise, I would be more than willing to participate in experiments with test documents.  I could add a fellow experimenter to one of my groups.)

    So a published document remains yours.

    Collaborating allows the members of the group to update the document.  Each participant will be able to make new entries, edit existing entries, or delete content.  This can be very good or it can be very bad.  One of the groups I belong to chose to Collaborate an involved Greek word list.  After a couple of weeks the list became cleared.  Since the shared content is "at risk" I would recommend using the third option on the "Actions" control on the documents web page in order to "Duplicate" your document to make a private copy.  You can make backup copies even while the document is in the Collaboration state.

    It would be nice if someone would step forward and make an entry describing usage of the Faithlife notes feature.

  • Gary Foster
    Gary Foster Member Posts: 21 ✭✭

    Thanks David, that sounds like a useful feature. However, I like the conversational aspect of the community notes. I recently got into a discussion on the nature of forgiveness and we carried on a conversation through the community notes, all captured in one place. That would be tedious in regular notes (and would honestly clutter what I use the regular passage notes for).

    I might explore it as an option though. I think the faithlife community notes feature has great potential but it needs work.

    Update: I went ahead and shared my passage notes as a published resource. I really wish it didn't require other people to refresh each time they want updates and hope that isn't the case. However, it sounds better than duplicating all my passage notes into community notes. I might encourage the others in my group to share their passage notes out and publish them as well, that way changes can be avoided and collisions won't happen but everyone can see everyone else's notes.