Missing shared review comments

[tkelly5446]

We've been successfully using the shared review feature for years without any issues. Recently we've had reviews where the initiator and reviewers do not see all of the comments that have been added. Each reviewer may see comments from some or all of the contributors, plus if you join back in the review at a later time, the comments that you see can have changed. For example, the first time I check, I see only reviewers A and B. The second time I see only reviewers C, D, and E.

We've covered bases by having individual commenters save and send their PDFs to the initiator but we can't operate this way not knowing if we may lose comments.

We are using the latest Adobe Acrobat Pro DC from the Creative Cloud and saving the comments to SharePoint 2010.

We have recently switched our protection software to Forticlient, which has seemed to have difficulty with Adobe applications but I am sure it is part of this issue.

Any info/troubleshooting tips would be appreciated.

[susanr39592554]

My client spent several hours reviewing and commenting on a job that I shared with her in CC. I began working through her comments last night. This morning, i re-opened the file on CC, and all of her comments are gone!

Did you get a fix for this on another forum, etc.? If so, will you pass it along?

[tkelly5446]

We have not figured this out yet. We've done additional testing but haven't been able to identify where the problem is occurring. If we find anything, I'll let you know. Please do the same.

Thanks

[NSemrau]

We are in the same situation, and just noticed that random comments are disappearing from our shared reviews as well. This is very troubling, because there is no way to easily see when someone's comments have disappeared.

We use a shared server to host our reviews, and have been doing so successfully for years. All users have write access to the folder where we store the shared reviews.

For some (seemingly random) reviewers, the XML file is created, and the location of the comments is written in the top portion of the xml file with the guid, but the actual comment content associated with the guid is missing.

Examples:

Good review xml (comments appear):

Bad review xml (comments are missing):

[as6906091]

We have issues with disappearing comments and also with duplicate comments.

Using Acrobat 11 Pro - there is a different GUID for each comment but everything else is duplicate. This happens:

* On vpn

*When in the office (not on vpn) from a shared network drive

* It also happens when using sharepoint.

[AnnFreeman]

I'm having the same situation here. Symptoms:

- Comments disappear from one viewing to the next.

- Partial comments show from some reviewers, but not all.

- Logging out of and logging back in to server sometimes helps, oftentimes, not.

- Hard to tell whether there really are "no new comments" or that comments are there but not viewable

[AnnFreeman]

This should not be marked "Assumed Answered". It is still a problem for many colleagues.

[FGress]

Yes it's still a problem!

See also:

Unable to Get New Comments on Shared Review with SharePoint Online

[~graffiti]

That is an automatic forum function (sucks, I know, but nobody is marking this as assumed answered). Please stop reporting it as abuse.

[David_DRT]

I think the problem is how bad Adobe's support is. We pay lots of money for crummy software with no support. The forums are filled with trashy "Answers", broken links and redirects to Assumed answered articles. I am willing to bet there are dozen other forum posts redirected here for an answer when there isn't one.

[joannec11299709]

I have a workaround that has worked successfully so far. My theory is below after the workaround.

1. Quit Acrobat.

2. In the Task Manager, kill these processes:

• acrotray.exe
• AdobeCollabSync.exe

3. Click on the PDF to open it.

All comments should appear, for at least a few minutes or until you start clicking around the PDF. You can immediately export all comments to .fdf so that even if the comments disappear, you can just reload the .fdf to see all comments again.

I have a strong suspicion that this is a collabsync problem. In our environment, employees’ (reviewers') laptops are automatically updated at various times with new Acrobat Reader DC software, and the collabsync file is not included (and is actually deleted) because corporate believes opening shared PDFs on a server is a security risk. So Tech Pubs goes online, finds the latest Reader DC, downloads the corresponding collabsync file, gives it to IT, and then has each employee go to IT to have the collabsync file installed again. It’s possible that either we downloaded or IT installs the wrong version of collabsync, and employees end up with the wrong version for their Reader DC, which causes communication problems when publishing or loading comments.

Also, or alternatively, the writers only update Acrobat Pro every year or so but Reader DC seems to be updated every few months, and our Pro collabsync file may not play well with the latest Reader DC collabsync and vice-versa.

Finally, our company has high network security protocols in place. Another vendor we've been talking to because of intermittent network problems with their product says the behavior we're seeing is typical of firewall or network security issues. Shared reviews require a stable network so all reviewers' comments get propagated to everyone. If nodes are temporarily blocked or unavailable, comments get lost.