GRIPEY
EXCELLENT post. You are not wrong. I believe that some have NO interest in offered IDs, they just want to appear in iSpot.
And[quote=“marlandza, post:8, topic:263”]
tired of all the gripes.
[/quote]
is fair too - Gripes have crept into my minor distraction thread Titled PROJECTS - Ideas for the Future We are all so Gripey, we have lost sight of some of the pleasures that still exist and few of us appear to be helping those who are genuinely NOT dumping their pictures in iSpot.
I think there are enough Gripes in here and The GoogleSheets to keep the Coders busy for a while.
So you are saying that if we find any more bugs, we should gloss over them?
Or that we have griped enough and thus must stop feeling unhappy? (i.e. we are so unhappy that we should be happy that we are unhappy?)
Come on. Some of our bugs cannot be more than 5 minutes work. Others require more work. Some are such bad design they can never be fixed without a total rewrite (like observations and projects changing their urls if the locality or filter is changed).
We need some good news. We need some bugs fixed. First of all the easiest and worst. Then the harder and worst, spiced with the less important but easy, just to keep morale up.
But it looks like everyone competent is fixing the TRACK and CHANGES and all the bugs have been abandoned. This is exactly what happened in Sept 2014, when serious bug fixing only occurred in January after months of griping.
I still say: unless you want to wait until January 2018 (by when the South Africans will have left iSpot), then dont gripe. IF you want to get this all fixed: then GRIPE!
Forget boycots, and hiding your observations behind banners, GRIPE!!
We have bugs posted on 6 July that are still totally unfixed. When are they going to be looked at? We still have Error 500 and Error 404 reported daily.
I detect fatigue and lassitude setting in. An acceptance of a substandard, corrupted iSpot. The sooner we give up, the sooner the debuggers are let off the hook.
You will get what you demand, and if you demand nothing that is what you will get …
Certainly NOT. But every thread is now a Gripe; many of the Gripes are covering the same Gripe - that Coders are not watching the game. Further, I suspect the Coders and Senior Admis are rolling their eyes and shrugging - someone obviously is.
I believe we may have ‘run the course’ here and that MAYBE there is a need for a New Category called GRIPES, where all we can rant, add to the growing list of difficulties, coding errors, dictionary issues, bugs.
I tell you something I’ve noticed (you can see) - very few people are contributing here (in the Forums) or asking how they best use the features in the Dysfunctional Site[quote=“Tony_Rebelo, post:22, topic:263”]
just to keep morale up.
[/quote]
yes?
That is the problem with this forum! It is linear and not organized so finding things is impossible
There is a gripes forum here:
GRIPES - yes GRIPES - started 11 July.
And the only person who has griped so far is me!!!
People dont just want to gripe. They want to gripe about something. So the gripes are under the topic that people are unhappy with.
I think it is good news that people dont just want to gripe for the fun of it. They gripe about issues that affect them! If there are gripes they place them there.
The only thing worse than the C&SA rolling their eyes and shrugging, is them thinking that no one cares about the bugs and so they dont have to do anything, not even roll their eyes and shrug whatever it is that they shrug - responsibility probably …
I just hope that that does not mean that they have abandoned iSpot. That would be a pity …
Tired of gripes??
A pity the changes is not working, otherwise you will see that the following of your IDs did not work because of bugs and lack of griping.
Here they are:
Here are correctly identified observations that are not working due to bugs. But hey: let us not complain because the programmers dont complain because of the wrong identifications.
After all - do we really want a working site? Let us wait until the site is working again. 3020 perhaps?
Please dont tell me that you deleted these observations posted in 2012 and then added them again so that the interaction would work. I dont want to hear.
Clearly you dont mind that the site is not working and you have enough time to fix up all the bugs yourself. If you are keen I have another 3545 of these that need fixing :: Missing Interactions - Please say no and that you have better things to do …
These problems have happened before with the old iSpot - so I take them in my stride.
NO I’ve not deleted and reposted - Just soldiering on with masses of pictures that I still need to post.
I’ve only recently found out how to do the associations.
Yes, I will do that. but beware the rebeloresponse.
I suspect it depends what iSpot is for. When I started using it the intention was about helping people develop their ID skills. An inadequate image which elicits comments on what would be needed to be identifiable is meeting that educational function.
If you want to use it as a recording system those records will not be much use, but iSpot is really not well designed as a recording system in so many ways that I cannot really see that ever being its primary purpose.
That’s not to say that generating some alternative metrics to allow records to be extracted by those recording schemes that want to would not be useful.
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Maybe I’m losing the plot here - but I don’t think you need to delete and re-post.
I think I’ve just gone back to the main post and re-attached the associated link. I need to check.
The new iSpot helps you by suggesting a list of observations to select from
OK UPDATED dejayM - I’ve done a quick check of this post with numerous associations. All one needs to do is identify the parent (well that is what I did) and then under interactions just select the appropriate ones.
THEN just to see if iSpot would cope I added a revised ID of the parent post.
I had the one association open on my desktop and found that by refreshing with F5 the interaction appeared.
Yes, that will work if you created the interaction on the old iSpot and it has an identical locality.
It wont work if the locality is more than 20m away.
Ironically, it is now not possible to create an interaction in the same way. One has to reenter the locality from scratch.
But we are using iSpot just for that in southern Africa.
But then unlike the UK with a few thousand species, South Africa has tens of thousands of species and most UK type recording schemes are useless because of problems with species identification. Adding photographs is the most obvious solution to this problem.
iSpot as a Virtual Museum is ideally suited to hosting photographs for this purpose. Plus its “crowd sourcing” of IDs with a reputation system is unique and far better than any other sites available.
iSpot has such amazing potential. The travesty of this rewrite (and indeed the Sept 2014 one) is that the programmers are totally naive of the entire museum and identification requirements of such a site, which were so elegantly and holistically incorporated into the original site.
And yes: a proportion of the records will be unusable - regard them as “training” observations. And some taxa are not identifiable beyond a certain rank - accept that as a limitation on ID of that taxon. Either way the data and process is useful for delivering better data down the line.
The biggest problem is the loss of curation rights by the curators. Good data requires curation and cannot cope with sloppy and wrong data which need to be fixed or expunged.