I noticed 2 of my observations’ locations were wrong, in the ocean.
I edited both the observations. The one lost the picture/s and the other one not.
No funny things (’/"/&/#/etc.) and I did not do anything to the pictures.
Picture still there:
Picture/s gone: (do not remember how many pics I posted.)
I do not know what happened to change the localities. I never checked before, but I can not think I posted it like that. Could the date have been corrupted in the update?
There must be more to it than that - surely. I have just edited 4 locations, no issues to report. Ask Cheekychew to reload before before forgetting which ones?
I disagree! - we will discover nothing we did not know already. Viz: if you edit an observation there is a good chance that your pictures will vanish irrecoverably and you will have to upload them because the iSpot programmers dont care two sh!ts about fixing the errors of bad programming. (the pictures must still exist: it is surely only the links that have vanished).
We know that already. All that the tracking will do is allow one to confirm that the user made an edit, and therefore that the pictures did not just evaporate on their own: but we know that already.
I process 50-500 observations per day. There is no ways I will detect if an “edit” corrupts data from my Changes Tracker: I am only interested in New IDs and Comments. And these will be hidden in my own 50-500 changes (done by me) so I wont even know about it except by accident.
In your example above we dont even know if it was the 22 or 27 edit which lost the data (presumably the latter otherwise Tyrole would have squealed - unless she is so demoralized that she no longer cares).
What would be nice is if we can figure out why they disappear, but it appears to be random. It is not the type of edit (some are gone by editing habitat, others by editing tags and some by adding pictures). Might it be the page that one leaves from? We know that some characters cause problems (but this has allegedly been fixed). As you say, it happens to unsuspecting users, not to those of us who could intuit a possible reason based on what we did.
you might be making this sound worse than it is. If ONLY someone would try a reload or respond to my question about illegal characters then we (I) might be nearer. Not ONE single person has responded,
If this happened to me, I would quietly reload, or delete the bloody thing and start again. I would report the occurrence and badger the team until they said something.
Tyone Edited the pic 22nd, why did she not squeal or read Bushboys comment the day after? You will say they are too busy uploading hundreds of observations - NOT true in her case.
Of course I know this is a Code error but we need help from Users, or rather the Coders do
Probably because the left iSpot and is now using something else? But more realistically because the tracking is new and she does not even know about it yet! In fact, she does not even know her pictures are missing yet, otherwise I am certain she would have posted a comment or sent an email to the curator!
But quite honestly, why should users want to help us debug? They want a bug free iSpot, not to have to spend their valuable time trying to do the programmers job (they get paid for this after all!). Rather just go to a site that works …
The company doing the bug fixes needs to be fired as incompetent and should not be paid!
I have left a note in Agglomeration of Alticini
Illustration and words removed to the thread Update: changes and tracking functionality - from the iSpot Team
(why is this under missing pictures - belongs on the track changes page)
YES: I have commented on this, but I see that I forgot to add it as a bug.
I did not pick up on the commented and edited and suggest that you go back further.
You will discover that if you comment on an observation, iSpot will include in the “Changes Tracker” the change date on which it was CREATED. So the Change Tracker reports on the creation event if you do something to an observation. How absurd is that.
If it was not created you could not comment on it, and if you commented on it it must have been created. Including creation as an option in the filter changes is bizarre enough (“tell me which observations are being created that I will contribute to!”), but to include it in the list of observations you have contributed to and to show it as “created” is truly absurd.
Clearly a tracking table has been used without any intelligent thought into making it work as an “unread”.
Will add it as a bug … (what is the bet that the programmers will argue that it is not a bug and does not need fixing? Willing to stake a bottle of Scapa on it?)
Yes: we have requested usrs to upload their pictures. No trusting the programmers. Rather not let it drag on too long otherwise people will mislay or forget their pictures
use Changes Tracker and select change type EDIT and date after 20 June. check all the edits done by you.
a quicker way that wont help if you edited old data is:
got to MySpot > Observations and click MAP and then Gallery (much faster than creating a Global Observations Gallery with filter = USER = AlexanderR) and scroll through all your observations post June 2017.
Note that it is all or nothing. All your pictures (and thumbnails and intermediates) are lost with this bug. We are not aware of odd pictures vanishing: all reports are of catastrophic total loss.
WONDERING
I am wondering if we should ask for the Tag Missing Picture for these posts.
I have dropped a few comments of people in the last few days and some,have reloaded successfully.
Once people have either ignored the request, can’t find originals or have been successful then we lose them. We still do not know the case but a trigger seems always to be an Edit.
I had an epic yesterday uploading, when fully loaded the pics lose their size notification (have you noticed?) I had three rogue pix yesterday that did not do this but I was blocked from clicking confirmation - the whole upload just hung but may eventually have allowed confirmation.
Only the user can add a tag, and if they are willing to add a tag, they are probably willing to reload their pics. So this wont work at all!
For 99% of my data if the pics were lost I could not restore them! I would have to rely on the programmers to find it or delete the observation. A reprehensible state of affairs.
For southern African observations we could add a comment with either a special heading (e.g. Lost Picture) or a special text (e.g. Observation with lost images for notification). And I could extract these from the data dumps (if we are going to get any data dumps: looks like there are issues there as well).
But for the UK, you will have to liaise with the UK curator and see what they are willing to do.
We had a data corruption like this in late 2011. Richard wrote us a special programme that found all the unbound images and justiposed them against observations with no images and those with similar images. One merely linked the two and the were rejoined. Still I seem to remember we had a few dozen pictures left over that we could not assign.
The difference between this and then are light years apart. Richard communicated, cared about the missing data and wrote special modules to help fix the data. Here they dont communicate, deny that the bugs exist and then pretend that it is not their fault that the data are missing. Deplorable!
