Observation Deletion

Where and How ??? Does not seem to be possible to unpublish

@Wildlife_Ranger (does that give you a special flag?)
Your iSpot/Observations/Unpublish [are you certain?]
All so intuitive eh?

Has taken a few attempts . In Your Obs there is an Unpublish and wait for dialogue to load and then confirm

But what is “unpublish”

On the ZA site we do not want people to get IDs and then delete the observations. That defeats the purpose of a record of occurrances which is what iSpot is primarily in southern Africa.

What does unpublish do? It is not “delete”, so what does it mean and how does it work? Why have it at all?

Hello Tony

To answer your question I understand that the unpublish option in Your Observations removes the observation but likely remains on the server back up .

Why: Why allow this at all?

This is contrary to the entire spirit with which southern Africa enlisted to iSpot. Deleting or unpublishing is not an acceptable option.
It is unethical to post something and then after input and discussion from others delete everyone else’s hard work and contributions. What is the logic?

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What a load of Rubbish

Firstly , in this country , there is a right to preserve your own data , work or intellectual property . Secondly there is no right right to presume any one is correct - i-spot works on consensus . Thirdly . when an observation has been made and someone persistently harasses or demeans - you have every right to moderate a post. in the absence of i-spot by reserving the right to withdraw it . Fourthly in the circumstances you describe you are making the assumption that the sun shines out of your ears , academics are very good at making presumptions over others and keeping themselves in work Fifthly, others choose to contribute , hard work means recording your own observations the matter of choice on your own hard remains with you no one else, Sixthly read the T& C of i-spot which correctly reflects the right to withdraw imaging or observations , Seven, in the majority of your comments they are related to technical issues often not relevant to the natural history and often finding there way to the UK . there is and always was a delete button on the i-spot site. In terms of ethos and spirit i-spot has become shoddy , faills to administer basic responsibilities and technically lacks input from some form of structured team , coupled with the recent changes , which as pointed out elsewhere are less to do with site development and more to do with a rapid response to the global security crisis ( and I do wonder if it was jacked whether data inclusing email addresses was taken ) . I-spot has lost or indeed never had the capacity to be self critical , it has not become the communityit alludes to it generally appears to be a site were th main input is actually limitted in number by a the number of people (myself included) this does not give the wider community an opportunity to contribute or demonstrate learning goals from an identification point of view , at a reserach level I also find it astonishing that i-spot can claim rapid turn around observations when this is being made by a few of the same people. I suspect this is a little bit of trumpet playing for the purposes of grants and looking good . The concept of i-spot is good it does however need to go back to basics and to identify the needs of users either at the identification level or the participation level to engage , retain and promote a wider audience ,

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This has been mentioned elsewhere on the forum as being the real reason behind this overturning of the whole site. Hmmm … such a panic measure would explain why the whole thing’s ended up in such a mess!

Hi Sparky lass thanks for your input - such a shame that it has detracted from the core ethos of enjoying nature , contributing to it and helping people understand it .- but hey happy snapping - the camera stil works :slight_smile:

You’re welcome WR, sadly, i’m afraid all this is putting me right off, just when i thought i’d found a great online recording medium that didn’t involve the evil facebook!

It seems some long-standing contributors may be going “on strike” and i’m wondering whether to join them in solidarity.

Has anybody had any proper responses from the OU Vice Chancellor? You knowm has there been anything from the OU that actually address the real and major deficiencies and lack of two-way communication, as discussed in these forum posts?

Hang in there . But you are right there were few regular committed experts in the first place even less now . “

Take some consolation in the foolowing quotes LOL

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

Henry Brooks Adams

Man is Nature’s sole mistake.

W.S. Gilbert

Personally, I’ve not gone on strike, but at the moment I can’t see any value to using the site. As discussed elsewhere (probably at too great a length), I find the inability to quickly see changes to other people’s posts frustrating. Apart from the obvious drawback, it has taken away the feeling of community, which the new all-singing, all-dancing fora/forums do little to remedy, especially given the tone of the majority of comments. Including mine, which is why I stopped.
A new issue I failed to resolve when I had a look at the new observations, is how to see only UK posts when I “explore community… list”. No offence to our users elsewhere, but I don’t really want to see a list of SA posts, interesting though they may be.

To see only UK posts you need to click on “Communities” in the right hand side of the toolbar and choose “UK and Ireland”. This, I think, hasn’t changed. However, it does seem to default back to showing all communities fairly regularly which it never did for me before the change.

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This is a bug. We have over the past week seen one UK post. How many of ours have you seen.

But our complaint goes even to the HELP WITH GLOBAL IDs carousel. Where were you since Sept 2014? We (ZA users - you probably did not read our forums) have complained ad nauseum and vociferously, that as southern Africans with 20 000 species of plants and 60 000 species of animals, to expect us to cope with the American or Australian or even rest of African species is utterly insane. Our field guides are inadequate for southern Africa: how the hell are we supposed to identify Sloths or Kangaroos or Newts?? Just let us deal with our own species please: the these observations in the HELP ID carousel do is add noise and take up useless space, making it harder - and sometimes impossible - to ID our own species.
But no one at iSpot cares or takes any note of users needs or gripes. The programmers rule and tough shit to the users who have to live with sloppy and stupid decisions.

I have not had this problem: the communities stay ZA.

UNLESS you use the search. The search ignores communities and then if you accidentally select an observation from another community, then iSpot just changes it for you without any warning or ceromony. The worst is when you use the ridiculous dictionary or surfer: you may only notice that you are in the wrong dictionary (based on the community) until you have done 10 clicks, and then you have to begin again! There needs to be two buttons:

  1. To move between the three dictionaries to the same taxon in the other dictionary
  2. A “search” button on the dictionary and on the surfer, so taht if you know that you have a “Gladiolus” or an “Accipeter” you go go straight there, without having to negotiate the dictionary/surfer from plants/animals/moulds via obtuse higher taxa that even experts do not know about.

You’re right - it seems to want to default back to global, but I am using it so seldom now I hadn’t picked up on that.

Yes one gets locked into a community by just being inquisitive - easy to escape but inconvenient.

easy to escape: IF YOU NOTICE. But often it is only after one starts to feel uneasy and frustrated that one notices. And we are seasoned users: novices will be totally lost as to what has happened.

Written with such passion. Perhaps the changed system has re-energised frequent users to say the previously unsayable (is that even a word). So, perhaps change can be good, if perhaps it’s means a few bumps in the road.

If I were on the receiving end of this. I’d (1) take a while to digest and get over my hurt, (2) meet to discuss how we got here, (3) seek your views on how to put it right, (4) work to make it right.

I do hope you get a chance to represent this further.
MikeQ

Hi Colin - I’d be interested in your observations to the Forum Topic “Is anyone watching” on this site. It seems to me that “ordinary amatuer wildlife watchers/users”, which I consider myself to be, are in danger of being ridden roughshod over by the “academics” to which you refer.