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Last updated 4 Aug 2022

 

First of all, I know that for some of you Zap drafts have been a very frustrating experience and I’m very sorry. The engineering team know that you are running into issues and are working to fix them as soon as possible. Secondly, some of the difficulty that users have had publishing drafts are due to the buttons and instructions being confusing, we’re also looking into ways of improving that. 

If you are having trouble for any reason, please contact the Zapier Support team using the Get Help form. There are different reasons why the Drafts feature may not be working as you expect, and sending a message to the Support Team means that: 

  1. Our Customer Champions will look at your Zaps and their logs to see if there’s anything that we can do to help you right now
  2. The Support Team can log any and all issues with the drafts feature, which helps the Engineering team to understand what issues our users are having and to how to prioritize fixing them

 

UPDATE 26 MAY 2022

One of our Product Managers, @Sabina has posted an update about some of the errors that users have run into and what we’ve done to fix them

 

If the Publish button is grayed out and you can’t press it, there could be a couple of things that you need to look at. The Publish button will tell you what you need to address. 

 

If the button says Fix to Publish, that means that there’s an error in your draft, which you need to fix before you’ll be able to Publish the draft. 

 

 

If the button says Update to Publish, then there draft of the Zap isn’t different enough from the currently Published Zap. Make some changes to the draft and you’ll be able to publish it. 

 

 

 

Other Workarounds

We’ve identified a few different reasons why you might not be able to publish your Zaps, so there isn’t one workaround that will definitely work for you, but here are some that our members have found:

 

@Caitlin B. found this solution when you are working in the Zap editor:

While you’re editing the draft and the “publish” button is grey and unresponsive (and you have made changes to the draft): 

  1. When you are in the Zap editor, click “Save draft & Exit” button; 
  2. Then disable the zap (turn it off right there); 
  3. The re-enable the zap (turn it back on); 
  4. A popup should appear with options to publish your draft - select the option where you publish and enable your draft.

 

@MikeTak found that the following worked when you start from the My Zaps page:

  1. Go to My Zaps and turn Zap OFF  before editing the Zap
  2. Go into Zap of interest, click “Edit”
  3. Wait for the Zap to fully load
  4. “Save draft and exit”
  5. Use the button at the top of the individual Zap menu to turn back on, should have an option for “Publish & enable draft” 

 

 

 

 

If you are seeing an error that says Error retrieving gives for step >number], unknown error, unknown error, unknown error, unknown error, unknown error, unknown error, unknown error Here’s a workaround that one of our Customer Champions has identified:

  1. Click Publish Zap in the editor as usual. 
  2. The editor will give confirmation within the Zap view, and on the top right bar, the slider (on/off switch) is green/ON. 
  3. Manually turn the slider OFF (ie click it) 
  4. Manually slide it back to green/ON. 
  5. The editor gives the option to either publish the current version or to save and publish the draft version. 
  6. Select the first option.
  7. The Zap is able to turn on.

 

 

Again, I want to apologize for the frustration that some of you are having with the Drafts feature. Please contact the Support Team using the Get Help form so that they can properly log any issues that you’re having and possibly offer you a solution. 

Thanks to @Caitlin B. for her workaround! I was pulling my hair out thinking, it’s all GREEN what’s up with that button. Thanks team for the publication.

Are there any other possible workarounds for this issue? I have several existing Zaps that I need to change which spreadsheet the information is sent to. I edit the Zap, change the spreadsheet name and Worksheet name, and the test works perfectly - sends the data to the new location that I’ve just specified. But then I can’t save the Zap (but there’s no warning telling me what needs to change). If I back out and then try to edit the draft, the Spreadsheet Name has reverted to what it was originally.

 

I don’t know if there’s something with my Google Drive that is causing an issue, but I own the spreadsheet I’m trying to change it to, and as I mentioned, the test works perfectly fine.

Are there any other possible workarounds for this issue? I have several existing Zaps that I need to change which spreadsheet the information is sent to. I edit the Zap, change the spreadsheet name and Worksheet name, and the test works perfectly - sends the data to the new location that I’ve just specified. But then I can’t save the Zap (but there’s no warning telling me what needs to change). If I back out and then try to edit the draft, the Spreadsheet Name has reverted to what it was originally.

 

I don’t know if there’s something with my Google Drive that is causing an issue, but I own the spreadsheet I’m trying to change it to, and as I mentioned, the test works perfectly fine.

I am having the exact issue. Tried all the workarounds mentionned

Are there any other possible workarounds for this issue? I have several existing Zaps that I need to change which spreadsheet the information is sent to. I edit the Zap, change the spreadsheet name and Worksheet name, and the test works perfectly - sends the data to the new location that I’ve just specified. But then I can’t save the Zap (but there’s no warning telling me what needs to change). If I back out and then try to edit the draft, the Spreadsheet Name has reverted to what it was originally.

 

I don’t know if there’s something with my Google Drive that is causing an issue, but I own the spreadsheet I’m trying to change it to, and as I mentioned, the test works perfectly fine.

I am having the exact issue. Tried all the workarounds mentionned

I am having the same issue tooo! Zapier team Help :(

 

 

I cannot seem to find the workaround for this issue. Please Zapier Team Help! I pay monthly for your services and I expect at least a call by someone or for someone to at least fix this issue. This is frustrating.

Are there any other possible workarounds for this issue? I have several existing Zaps that I need to change which spreadsheet the information is sent to. I edit the Zap, change the spreadsheet name and Worksheet name, and the test works perfectly - sends the data to the new location that I’ve just specified. But then I can’t save the Zap (but there’s no warning telling me what needs to change). If I back out and then try to edit the draft, the Spreadsheet Name has reverted to what it was originally.

 

I don’t know if there’s something with my Google Drive that is causing an issue, but I own the spreadsheet I’m trying to change it to, and as I mentioned, the test works perfectly fine.

I cant believe this is still a problem after so long since it was first reported here… 

I am having the same problem as the others here…  I’ll create a ticket but this seems to be something that has been around for a while and is disappointing that it is still persistent.

Well what are we waiting for - I can not save a draft - I keep getting a browser warning that the page is unresponsive. Not a great first experience, and the lack of response here too?  

Still having this issue - 2 years later. 

I am having exactly the same problem as people from 2 years ago! How come Zapier staff have no solved these issues as yet?

 

The introduction of the draft system was an abomination. It has caused me huge problems whilst offering nothing.

 

What should be the simplest of tasks - editing a zap - is ridiculously troublesome and mostly, impossible to do.

 

Hey folks 👋

I’m so sorry we missed all the messages here and for any frustration caused by the issues with saving new drafts! Sounds like there’s two separate issues here, this first one:

julia-the-geek wrote:

Are there any other possible workarounds for this issue? I have several existing Zaps that I need to change which spreadsheet the information is sent to. I edit the Zap, change the spreadsheet name and Worksheet name, and the test works perfectly - sends the data to the new location that I’ve just specified. But then I can’t save the Zap (but there’s no warning telling me what needs to change). If I back out and then try to edit the draft, the Spreadsheet Name has reverted to what it was originally. 


I don’t know if there’s something with my Google Drive that is causing an issue, but I own the spreadsheet I’m trying to change it to, and as I mentioned, the test works perfectly fine.


And this second one:

Well what are we waiting for - I can not save a draft - I keep getting a browser warning that the page is unresponsive. Not a great first experience, and the lack of response here too?  


For the first issue:

I did some testing and was able to replicate this in one of my own Zaps. I changed the selected spreadsheet and worksheet and ran a test that was successful but the Publish button was still greyed out:
0e051e2164a1ff4cf3220de1671e616b.png
It seems like there’s some sort of bug or caching issue that’s causing the Zap to not to see that the updated action was tested successfully. So I thought I’d try making another change to the action to try and force it to look at the action - I just updated the title of it and that then seemed to force it to enable the Publish button so that the updated version of the Zap could be published:

c6ec7a2bfb0d051b70c4bdff7cf0b199.png
So I’d suggest making an edit to the title of the action to get the Publish button to appear. Once it’s enabled, you can change it to how it was named before and the button should will remain enabled. 🙂

It’s not ideal to have use that workaround to be able to publish a new version every time so I’d really recommend reaching out to our Support team to flag this. They’ll be able to get a bug report created so that our engineers can work on getting that fixed! You can get in touch with them here: https://zapier.com/app/get-help

For the second issue:
I can see that ​@Gregier reached out to our Support team and it appears to have been caused by an incident that was since resolved: https://status.zapier.com/incidents/4dxl71m2xmbd so this should no longer be occuring. If it is, it would be best to contact our Support team so that they can help to get that sorted.


I know I’m a little late to the party, but I hope the workaround I found of editing the name is helpful! If there’s anything else we can assist with, feel free to reach out to the Community—we’d love to hear from you! 🧡

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