Update: changes and tracking functionality - from the iSpot Team

None of this is good for your health Tony.
You need, we all need,
a 2-way route to the Coding Team
A SHORT list of the 5, yes FIVE, most pressing issues; ones that everyone will benefit from immediately.
Search everything and anything should be high on that list but I suspect it will not be easy to fix
So
1 Comments made editable until locked by reply
2 Search for Observations with the Taxonomic link, title or ID ???
3 Tony’s Choice
4 Mike’s Choice
5 The most pressing and universally useful in the Bug List

i REALLY mean 5 Tony - work on it hard and fast, five at a time
Draw up the next most pressing Five but leave them in a drawer until the first Five are done
Ends…

5 most pressing:

  1. Identification box with meaningful scientific names and correctly linked to dictionary
  2. locality autofill from old name
  3. the bug on the pictures page of the upload wizard preventing bulk uploading
  4. the edit of comments until locked
  5. Google access (step 1 to the Search)

OK. Done.
and I have the next 20 pages of 5 bugs in my drawer.
When do you think I can pull out the next page???
6. Changes (the old version)
7. Search
8. Remove those stupid intermediate pains from the galleries
9… Fix the Browser displays (not showing genera, dropping one species, etc.)
10. Give us back our old format pictures on the Observation : two columns of half page size pictures - with fast upload times…
OK: done next 40 pages … how far have the programmers got so far on the first 5? Are they nearly done?

BUT
(more on anger management!)

I realize now that there are some bugs that are really annoying but not important, but would make the site more pleasant. Most importantly they wont stare in our faces and remind us of how horrible the site has become:

The top 5 are:

1 Open (download an existing) observations MUCH faster (we asked for a faster site and we got a plodder)
2 fix the map to remember what I want to see: satellite or map view (this must be low hanging fruit: add the scale bar at the same time)
3 fix the gallery and carousels so that the pictures fill the display area (and make them 5-10% bigger - they are too small: what is the point of them if you cannot see them properly)
4 allow editing of comments until locked (oh horrors! and the preview pain is horrid too: cannot see the final format at all. What a ridiculous sitautation).
5 Changes - restore the old version. (WE WANT OUR CHANGES BACK: and while at it, why not the option to be told about these by email or watsapp?)

and 6. oh I definitely need six!

6 On the LIST view open all the pictures at once and dont bloodywell wait until I get to them to make me wait … (it is like they want to remind us that the site is working at half speed and they dont care that we have to wait for them …)

  • sitautation: yes the spell checker is happy with this!! might it be because of the bracket?

OK, you’ve got the Idea - better than my list. Make certain the five are the most useful to beginners - WE can struggle through.
The very first Priority is to get two-way comms with the Coders @miked - we are trying to be constructive here Mike but it HAS to be a two-way process and we believe it must happen soon, very soon please

OK: but only as long as they understand that there are another 110 lists like these in my drawers! And that these are the URGENT ones!

Adding observations are faster for me than previously…
although the lack of location memory is a pity.

Sorry bad wording. I am not complaining about adding observations, but the upload speed when one opens an observation.
What should I say “Open an observation” - OK will change it.

I might be a bit doff but I only see Activity Tracker on my user profile is there not supposed to be a second tab Changes Tracker as well???

And the only place i find it is under who’s on line - my user tab

Fixed the problem,

Good Not the Whose online, but YourSpot > Changes Tracker.

I wish that they would do it like it used to be - far more intuitive

Hiding it under your profile means that most users never find it!

But they seem scared that people will realize that “Your Spot” (with the summary statistics) is gone!

It has been previously commented that the yellow highlighting on the Changes Tracker shows changes since you last opened the changes track, with the result that you lose the highlighting on unexamined changes if you don’t look at the observations before leaving the Changes Tracker.

I have noticed that there is also a problem in the other direction. If you contribute to a new observation, your contributions, and everything prior to your contributions, show up highlighted in the Changes Tracker.

I’m finding it extremely annoying, after submitting an observation with a tentative ID included, to be told (1) I created an ob, and to then be told (2) that I identified it, as two separate entries on the tracker list - especially as I don’t want to see what I, myself, have been doing on the Changes-tracker list at all.

I’ve been ploughing through the forum pages for more than half an hour, having opened it in a new tab. I was looking at my Activity-tracker in the previous tab and I notice it is still loading. Is it loading my entire history of over 2000 obs posted and every comment I’ve ever made etc?

This are both listed as bugs, but I am willing to bet we will be told that track is supposed to work like this.

The truth is we dont want a Track, we want an UNREAD CHANGES. That is what we had. The programmers do not understand this …

No! It is only loading the first page of 50 of your 2000 obs, which it had to filter out of every single edit ever made on iSpot.

Whereas what we want is a short list of what we have not read in the last month.
see here for details: Update: changes and tracking functionality - from the iSpot Team

CLUTTER
The ZA night-shift has been busy so my Tracker (EVERYONE’S Tracker) is recording and reporting minute by minute entries. We really need only to see one, the most recent, change. And never our own actions.
This is a serious offence against Common Sense @miked. So Please get the team onto it, please tell US that you have done so and please tell us their response (Two-way comms please)

An associated problem is that now there are a lot of comments, I have to click Load More Comments (and may miss the notice), This will be an increasing problem now that Tracking has been restored - users like writing comments again! Default should be to Last Comment, notice could be Go to first Comment

In one way the Changes Tracker is an improvement on the old one; you don’t have to open up the observation to see who has agreed.

How does this work:
my Changes Tracker tells me a project for OU course 295 https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/project/742866/the-biology-of-survival-ou-course-s295-bioblitz-2017 has been recently favourited and I am being informed because I had previously commented (can’t think why I may have done but in these times of uncertainty anything is possible), it also says that this project has 6 comments but when opening it to discover what I might have said then I find there are no comments.
Sorry for not screen freezing the info, I still haven’t caught up with how to do that

Where there six entries for comments, or did it just say 6 in the comments column?

To copy a screen find the PrntScrn key - usually to the right of the function keys on the top row. Sometimes it just works, other times you need to use the function key (usually near your Ctrl and Alt keys.
Pressing this copies the screen into your scrap box. You should be able to paste it here (but sometimes that does not work and I edit it in Paint or even in my mail browser and then copy it and paste it here.