I have “Session Target” sets to reset every day at a certain time, and I’m starting to be quite puzzled by the fact that it actually never ever resets.
After a bit of research, it sounds like I’m not the only one, but there doesn’t seem to be any useful information regarding this issue.
As far as I know, it’s been like this for all projects, and it systematically never resets.
Posting here in case before going to the Bug Hunt forum. Thanks for any help.
Edit. That is with Scrivener 3. Never had this problem before and I have used Scrivener 2 on Mac for quite a couple years, and Scrivener 1 on Windows since release.
There must be some inconsistency here. What I’m having is it resets at midnight (also 3.0.3), and since I tend to write late and run past midnight, it’s annoying. I don’t remember my Windows version doing that. I had to exit Scrivener for it to reset the count or manually do it.
Well you can always change the reset time. But does it reset at midnight or it doesn’t reset at all?
On my side, session target never resets at all, unless I exit Scrivener or reset manually. It was working fine in Scrivener 2 so I’m not sure what can be happening here.
I actually looked around for a way to change the reset time - or better yet tell it not to reset until program exit, but didn’t find it. So I can do that?
After resetting at midnight several nights that I noticed, last night it didn’t reset at all. I don’t rely on it as much as some, so long as my total words keeps growing, I’m happy. Still, I did notice these weirdnesses lately. I’d have to say this is something that along with Name Generator I actually liked better on my Windows version of Scrivener - just because the window for it seemed smaller and I could tuck it in a corner out of the way more easily.
I would suggest turning on Show internal error alerts, in the General: Warnings preference pane, for a little while. We are aware of an error that can get thrown when starting a new session after a night, or even after the session reset time has passed. I’ve seen both forms myself, and more often I’ve not seen the error. It is very sporadic and difficult to pin down to any sequence of events, particularly since it is only seems to trigger after a period of inactivity.
But I’d be curious to see if there is some correlation between the reset not triggering and whether or not a warning precedes that condition.
The session reset settings are per-project, so they aren’t covered in Scrivener > Preferences… . Open your project targets window, and click on “options” in its lower-right corner. Then click on the “Session Targets” tab.
You can set your session to reset at a given time, or whenever you close the project, or when you re-open the project on a different day after your session started. Or, you can set it to “never” and just manually restart the session.
I know a lot of people just like to leave a project open all the time. If that’s you, then the “on project close” and “on opening on a different day” options aren’t terribly useful. Hope this helps you adjust the settings to your liking (and that the intermittent bug Ioa refers to doesn’t bite you too often.)
Silverdragon, thanks. That’s where I did look, evidently not hard enough, so I’ll do it again.
I exit Scrivener every day (okay, actually late night as in really a.m.) because - backup.
As I said, it’s not wildly important to me. I don’t even leave that target window open because I can’t get it enough out of the way on my laptop screen, but I do run my cursor over the indicators up top every so often, which is why I noticed the resets.
It just seemed strange that what I noticed was so very opposite of what the OP experienced.
The thread is going in a couple different directions, so I’m not sure, AmberV, if that suggestion was for me (turning on the Show internal error alerts), but I have done it.
I have yet to get my Session Target to reset by itself unfortunately. As SilverDragon mentioned, I’m one of those people who leave Scrivener open almost all the time, so it’s there when I need to add something to the project I’m working on—specially, as it is the case at the moment, when I’m working on a course I’m teaching.
Every week I have to prepare a set amount of content, so during the 3-4 days of my week that I work on that, the daily target is quite useful to give me an idea of what I need to do on those days. It’s not a big issue when I work on one or two documents (as I can keep track of the word count easily), but when I end up splitting my content to structure it differently I kind of lose track.
So, what should I do with those internal error alerts when/if they pop up? Not too sure about where this is going.
If you get one you’ll definitely notice. A window will pop up and there will be a bunch of geeky stuff in it. There will be a button to send the report in, you should let us know here when you do so I can look it up. You could also copy and paste the log info into a response.
What I’m looking for here is whether something like this happens around the time when it should reset, and if you notice a connection between it not resetting and this warning. For a cleaner test you should restart Scrivener to make sure any issues are not currently lingering.
Okay thanks for the update. Well that aside, it might help to post a screenshot of your “Session Target” options tab. At the least I could copy your settings into a few of my projects and keep an eye on it over a period of a few days.
Merci beaucoup! It is a little different from mine, so I will try those settings in my main project. I have been setting the reset to five minutes in advance. This way it happens all day long instead of once every 24 hours. But I will try after midnight as well. Would you say you tend to be working on the project leading up to when it should reset, or is this more something you notice later on, after doing other things?
I must admit I don’t understand your message. What do you mean when you say you have been setting the reset to five minutes in advance? In advance to what? I don’t understand what “happens all day long instead of once every 24 hours”. Only settings I see for reset are: a) a set time every day; b) on project close; c) on project open the next day; d) never.
Actually, what is exactly that third option? I see it in french so the wording might be different. I leave my Scrivener project pretty much open all the time so I thought that this option was useless in my situation.
The 4:00 reset time I put is a bit random. I tend to work on the project anywhere from 6AM to 4-5PM. I just set a time outside of my work time to be sure that the session targets doesn’t reset in the middle of my writing sessions.
I am setting the session reset so that it happens ten minutes from right now. And then I will continue to write in that project, and in ten minutes it will reset. Then I set it again another ten minutes ahead. It isn’t “every day”, it is whenever the time you set passes, so if the time is set to happen very soon, it should reset soon.
In this way I can test the reset happening over and over at a much greater speed than if I just set it for one time at some hour of the day and wait for many days to try different things.
I don’t know if would be practical to do that—it is just a way of testing software for things that otherwise would take months to test all the different checkboxes.
Okay so the main thing is that the reset happens while you aren’t working, and a long time after you have stopped working. Is the computer sleeping during this time, is it fully shut down and Scrivener closed, or does it stay on all night with Scrivener running?
Thanks for the explanations. I will do some testing with various reset time during the week-end.
To answer your question: the computer (a new 2018 Macbook Pro) is sleeping (not fully shut down) during the night, when the reset happens. What puzzles me a bit with this situation is that I’ve used Scrivener 2 for years in a similar way (with my previous MBP) and never had any kind of issue with the session target reset.
Three months later, I still can’t get session target to reset automatically. Just an update to let you guys know that I have pretty much given up on this. A bit sad as I liked that feature.
Unfortunately we haven’t received any other reports on this, so I’m still not sure how to see the problem myself, I never have. Did you get a chance to play with the reset time a bit? Mostly I’d be curious to see if it resets while you are working.
