Annotations only visible in Content Panel

So, in "The Book of Moses" institute manual, I have a bunch of tags from a while ago that I just want to delete. The appear in the related content panel, but not in the main reading panel. Normally, you select the annotation box, click edit, then delete, but because no annotation or boxes appear in the main panel, I don't know how to delete it!

I'm a member of the Gospel Library for Windows team, but I think I can help you.

You need to tap on the tag inside the reference pane. It should then take you to a list of your tags. From there, you can select which tags you'd like to delete.

That only works with annotations that appear in the main panel. For these phantom annotations, when I click on the tag in the content panel, it just sits there confused, doesn't move or anything.

You should also be able to delete tags from your list of all tags, available from the main screen in the app. Notes >>> Tags. From there, you'll get the same large list I mentioned earlier.

Oh, I see. Yes, it is listed there with the message: "There was a problem retrieving content for this annotation. " but that worked, thank you!!!

No problem. Glad I was able to help.

Okay, that worked for a little, but all the tags came back maybe because of sync (and they were a PAIN to delete taking so long to load each page). Any other ideas?

I don't quite understand what has / has not worked, but:

1) If you go to Notes > Tags, open the tag in question, and long tap (press and hold) on an item, the display will change to have checkboxes on the left side, and you can check the box next to each that you want to delete and then tap the trash can icon in the icon bar. NOTE: I had to do this twice before the annotation was deleted - and it was entirely deleted (not just the tag, but the highlight too). The first time, it had no apparent effect (it asked for confirmation, but the annotation was still in the list), the second time, the annotation disappeared from the list and when I went back to the verse in question, the highlight was gone.
**IMPORTANT: DO NOT force a sync (Settings > Advanced Options > Resync All Annotations). Doing this pulls everything from the church's servers and disregards un-synchronized changes on the Android (it assumes there's a problem on the Android and you need to pull annotations fresh from the servers, so it overwrites the Android). Let the sync happen naturally.

2) If after that it still doesn't work, I would try going onto the Notes feature of LDS.org and deleting the highlights from there. (It looks slower there as you have to select one, delete it, repeat. But this may be needed if they keep coming back.)

3) If that doesn't work, the only other thing I can think of is to hack the Gospel Library database, which doesn't work as well as you might like. Then you'd have to sync (to convince the church servers it's gone). (Or you can try different sequences / combinations of power-cycling, clearing the cache, and deleting the app data - which would require re-download of content and annotations.)

FWIW,

Liz

1. Yes, I tried that and yes I had to delete 2 sometimes 3 times for it to actually work. By syncing on its own it just appears back in my panel (and by the way slows everything way down)

2. I'll try this, though the site version is buggy (doesn't always load when you click on something) and going through 10k+ notes makes for a slow process. I'll let you know if this solves the issue.

3. Don't tempt me!!! I work in the ROB, maybe I can find a developer

EDIT: oops, I may have found the problem, I did it on my phone, now I think i have to do it on my tablet... then probably on the website. Sooooo fun!!!

Ok, I think I have found a fast way through the website!!! Click all items, search for "Highlight" and some of the results brought back appear to be these phantom entries, 2 highlighted double quotes ""

Delete those, and I did a forced sync on my tablet, that appears to have gotten ride of the false references.