Hello again Wanda,

In considering how to fix this problem, I read your original post more carefully.  If I just open a Bookmarkshelf document with active agents and start editing, I don't see the problem, and by design, I should not.  But I've figured out how you may have.

Say that you changed something in one of your three Client browsers, then decided that a more major reorganization was necessary, quit the browsers, and opened the Bookmarkshelf file in BookMacster.  You did this all within, say, 2 minutes.  With Clients Safari, Chrome and Firefox, an Agent will "kick in" 5 minutes after you change a bookmark in one of them.  So, 3 minutes later, indeed you were interrupted by an Agent job.  Your Content would have been restored to the "previous state" existing in the web browser that was changed.  Furthermore, when BookMacster exports at the end of a sync, in order to make sure that nothing was missed (syncing is hard), BookMacster often needs to re-import and sometimes export once or twice more, particularly if the Agent is configured to Sort, and/or if you changed something in more than one Client within those first few minutes.  Because these re-sync jobs are staged to run at :00 seconds of the next minute, the whole process can take 2-5 minutes before things quiet down and let you get back to work.  But by that time, you would probably have been pretty upset and already writing your original post to this thread.

If the annoyance persisted beyond 5 minutes, that may have been due to some other actor touching a browser's bookmarks.  Since the browsers were quit, that rules out the browsers themselves, and rules out any syncing process that runs in a browser extension.  Xmarks for Safari, and Apple's iCloud syncer are the only remaining possibilities I know of.  If one of them decided to pipe up and push a change, that would start the whole Agent job sequence all over again, possibly for another 2-4 minutes.

If, during your editing, you manually initiate an Export, another Agent job sequence, again on a delayed fuse for 5 minutes, will commence, and possibly take 2-4 minutes to complete.  It will also commence if you manually Save while and have Settings ▸ Open/Save ▸ Auto Export switched on, although in this case a sheet will warn you that an export is going to occur.  (Possibly this is the case because you said that "saving  takes about 10 secs every time because it syncs all 3 browsers".  You should have been able to prevent the exports ("syncs") by clicking Save Only to the warning.)

Do you think I've explained everything that happened?

So far, I see three issues here.

• Due to a prior change, a staged Agent job can surprisingly commence a couple minutes after user has begun editing, even if browser Clients are idle and no external actor changes bookmarks.
• If an external actor changes bookmarks while user is editing, user will have work overwritten and generally be annoyed for the next several minutes.
• If user manually initiates an Export, or manually initiates a Save when Auto Export is switched on, and approves exporting, the resulting export operation will be unexpectedly long and may trigger an import too.

There may be more issues, if you reply and recall something I haven't thought of.  In the meantime, we're thinking about how to best fix these three.

Hello, Wanda.

BookMacster does have a timestamp function, and we're probably going to make this happen automatically in the next version, but for now the workaround is to temporarily disable Agents while you're editing your bookmarks in BookMacster.  Click to the tab Settings ▸ Agents and make switch off the first and last checkboxes.