BUGS, ERRORS and FAILURES

could you give some more detail on this as I had same issues when testing a few weeks ago but other person said it had worked fine on their android phone. e.g. name of device, amount of ram, browser etc

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Phone is a Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016), Android 6.0.1. 10GB storage. Tablet is a Samsung Tab A, same vintage, 16GB. Both using Firefox, as is this desktop.

https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/observation/733267/brahminy-kite is an Australian observation: why is it in the UK & Ireland community?

Hypothesis. The observer took the photograph while on holiday in Australia, and has subsequently returned home to England. iSpot took the location returned by the browser and on the grounds of this defaulted the observation to the UK+Ireland community. iSpot failed to reset the community when the correct location was added (either from EXIF data on image upload, or via the location page).

Perfectly reasonable explanation. But perhaps the key words in relation to “Bugs, Errors and Failures” are “iSpot failed to …” (or are we harking back to the heyday of the British Empire? :wink:)

Bug #423 - posted on 4 July. Wonder when it will be fixed?

ACCESS DENIED - You don’t have the required permissions to view this page.


I cannot get any of the links to work.
I may be the only one to be denied of course.

FAILURES
I’m feeling really LOW, no announcements for days and days.

FAILURES
Now over 4000 reads here - another FAILED project. Hours of work, many promises made, many people contributed and many people disappointed.
https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/project/282761/a-collation-of-interesting-or-unusual-uk-marine-posts

I wasn’t certain whether you meant that you were getting access denied on the link you gave, or in the links contained therein; experiment confirms the latter.

The links are to the domain admin.ispotnature.org. Probably they should be to www.ispotnature.org,

Could you clarify the nature of the problem, please.

I can edit the links (all broken) in the Marines Description Panel but an edit will destroy the 36 Project Gallery picture-sequence (only allowed 10) - they used to form a frontispiece classy two-page gallery of the best iSpot UK Marine pictures and they are all good. My seaweeds one was specially good with that aspect (the frontispiece)
The whole Marine project depended on people responding to my request to add a unique tag - ALL the pictures in the Main Gallery are collected via that request and that tag. Obviously I cannot ask for the tag as no-one will see my request.
I can begin the Project again - see ✴️ Interesting or unusual UK Marine Observations | Project | UK and Ireland | iSpot Nature as all the tags are in place.
But should I do it now? probably not because the Programmers here will change the code soon and ruin any new efforts.
The Fish Project relies on the INDEX in Comments - ALL broken and all Locked. Hours and hours of work - again I can put that right in a new project but it really did take a lot of effort index-link those little fishes!
Honestly I feel low about this. The project views have gone UP a good way this afternoon!

Time for more action? It is unacceptable that:

Historical observations and projects with more than 10 pictures no longer work.
Historical observations using the page formats present at the time that involved careful layout and design have been destroyed by unwanted and inferior current layouts, that do not work in slow linespeeds in Africa.

the same applies to the forums. On the southern African site.
The SeaKeys forum contained the coordinates for over 200 southern African Dive Sites. GONE.
The Southern Cape Community Forum contained several hundred CREW (Custodian of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers) reports. GONE.
Several forum topics contained ideas from dozens of iSpotters on how to improve iSpot, including ideas for the surfer, the dictionary, the quiz, interactions, but also improvements to the classification of habitats, interactions and the dictionary. GONE.
In the FAQ where dozens of pages on using iSpot efficiently (admittedly many of them are not applicable on this site at present, but perhaps this site may get as good as the previous, in which case most will be applicable). GONE
And the Observation of the month forum, where we discussed and posted the most exciting observations each month. GONE

And were we ever asked or consulted about these vanished? Were we told that on the new site the new forum would not be able to host these pages and that they would simply disappear?
Who made those decisions on our behalf, and what rights to they have to make them?

Time to consider going upstairs again?

Is anybody noting the amount of Observations being added per day? Has the new program caused a rise or decrease in posted ob’s? If one notes the ease of posting an Ob by drag and drop, then would expect an increase in activity.

For info SA community had a real bad day as far as postings are concerned.

I think that the number of UK plant observations is well down. The greater ease of entering observations is offset by the worse performance when viewing them, and the lack of a notification system of any form to flag responses. We may have also lost some users due to incompatibility with older browsers. Discourse in particular has a high specification, but even connection to the site is not possible for some people.

REAL ISSUE
The REAL issue here is that the ‘seniors’, the experienced, the enthusiastic helpers, those with the expertise to help with IDs, those who offer comment, or constructively advise and apply support to those who might arrive in all keenness, has almost gone.
I am very low down in that group but feel badly wounded and unable to help. Moreover - we are angry at the appalling way we have been misrepresented. WE are iSpot; we were consulted, we were ignored.
Whether or not the number of Observations has lessened (it surely has), the ethos is affected very badly. Wander through the new Observations to find agreements (some assume that is what it’s all about) a few modified IDs but precious few supporting comments or links to better resource - it is all a FAR and painful cry from the iSpot I joined.

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Subjectively I don’t get the impression that the number of new entries is down. But to be honest the new site is so slow (a noticeable pause each time I page down before the images associated with an entry appear) that I’m not really bothering to go through other entries much at present.

I am using how long it takes for observations to scroll over the carousel as a guide to the number of new entries.

Yes that makes sense, although I only check in about once a day so that they’ve all scrolled past since last time is the usual observation for me.

I know with iSpot in its current state I’ve stopped promoting it to people so if that is the sort of thing that has driven volumes in the past (not just me promoting it obviously but lots of other people too) then I suspect things will fall off.

Here are my data. I dont have data for the rest of the world after 2016.

Today is the 15th so half way thro July. At present we have 971 observations for July, so I expect 1950

Previous July’s are:
2011 - 487
2012 - 3111
2013 - 4588
2014 - 5436 (then came the merger: Sept 2014)
2015 - 3720
2016 - 3418 (then came the rewrite: July 2017)
2017 - 1950 - estimated.

Will it be back to 2011 levels. Five years of hard work in southern Africa totally undone?

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