In the current absence of notifications on observations and projects, I’ll mention that I’ve commented on your arable project.
Most of the regulars are hanging on in there in the hope that the Ispot programmers will eventually reinstate key features (e.g. changes). When it was working well, it was such a brilliant platform for seeking and providing identifications and learning from others that I am reluctant to give up on it just yet, and I am sure others feel the same way. It is not giving me what I need right now, but provided I am still helping others I will keep going for a while anyway - BUT PLEASE BRING BACK THE ‘CHANGES’ FEATURE before we all lose heart.
As I understand it, the CHANGES was considered irrelevant to the site and was not part of the rewrite. BELIEVE IT OR NOT.
But if it is to be done, it needs to be funded, then scoped, then put to tender, then quotes received and accepted, then a work plan put in place, then written, then tested then implemented then debugged…
Please keep your fingers crossed, but unless you believe in myracals dont hold your breath …
Remember this is a rewrite on a new platform. Bringing back is not an option: everything has to be done from scratch (although I cannot believe that lots of code cannot be ported across: some of the Sept 2014 errors that.have resurfaced suggest that a fair whack of code has been reused.)
That surprises me.
For two reasons
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The whole UK ethos of the site as an educational tool depended on people being able to find responses to their observations, identifications, and projects. Casual users may have come back a few days later, and looked at their observations or few, but for anyone using the site more intensively a more efficient way is necessary. I don’t want to have to look at a dozen observations once a day for say a week, and interactions occurring after a relatively short term would never be seen.
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They should have seen the usage of CHANGES in the server logs. Perhaps they failed to distinguish between the usage patterns of guests, casual users and power users.
We don’t necessarily bring need CHANGES as it was implemented. If they brought back UNREAD with suitable filtering (by user, to include identifications and comments, or alternatively by observer, by identifier and by commenter, and by group and by taxonomy) that would serve the same purpose. (I used to use CHANGES with everything by observations where I agreed with an identification switched on, and switched on the last once a week of so to pick up later identifications and comments. I used FAVOURITES to add vascular plants that I couldn’t identify so that CHANGES picked them up.)
Before UNREAD lost filtering by group I used to read every plant observation, identification and comment - I might get behind, but I’d catch up on a wet day. With filtering by taxonomy (and some substitute for changes so that identifications and comments are seen) fern or moss specialists could log in once in a while, and go through the observations that had built up. (Or I could ignore moss and liverwort observations for most of the time, and every now and again use a different filter to look at them - I’d suspect that it’s more educational to process them in batches.)
Summary: I think that a sufficiently powerful UNREAD is more flexible than CHANGES, and you can put in a CHANGES link which resolves to UNREAD filtered by user.
I am unfamiliar with UNREAD. I used TRACK a lot, and it sounds like what you are discussing. But I am surprized: I am certain that every registered iSpot user returning to iSpot would go to CHANGES as their first page after landing. It must be the second most used page on the site.
I suspect a total lack of any intelligent design on the new site. Surely the most visited pages would need to be streamlined and speed up and placed as handily as possible. Surely all these things were checked?
And I am dismally dissapointed with the loss of functionality I cannot believe that I am the only person (apart from those ini southern Africa I gave courses to) on things like -
on the species surfer you could add taxa to compare them. Say Capereeds and Segdes and Palms. It was as simple as
www.ispotnature.org/sanbi/browser/Restionaceae/Cyperaceae/Araceae - and now one cannot even do one family without knowing the secret iSpot code that needs to go in front of any taxon.
The loss of 5 years of forum topics is nothing less than a disaster.
While you’re trying to extract the forum contents from the OU, you could try the Wayback Machine at archive.org
There used to be an UNREAD page accessible for the yourISpot menu. It listed, in reverse chronological order, all pages that had changed since you last looked at them.
Before the 2014 (?) release there was filtering by group. I don’t know how well it worked for say Invertebrates, but the number of Plant observations was such that I could follow all plant observations, identifications and changes from that page. With the 2014 release, instead of added finer granularity of filtering (which I think has been suggested on the forums) all filtering was removed. At which point it was worse than the main plants carousel for accessing recent plant observations, and more trouble than it was worth for finding older stuff. Anything that I missed because I had a day or two out recording was effectively lost.
I do wonder whether the storage and computational requirements were becoming intractable - except as it was unusable in its new for (I assume) for most users the computation requirements would have been negligible. (Compared to CHANGES it had to record your last access to all observations, not just to observations you made, added an identification, comment or agreement to, or added to your favourites. Stray thought - perhaps CHANGES was dropped because it was hammering the database.)
Computers keep tabs of all sorts of things. This is simply a linear database of user and page and time. Compared to what banks do it is trivial.
I agree that it’s trivial to implement.
I haven’t programmed professionally for over 15 years, so I no longer have an intuitive feel for how long things take. (Back in those days I was pretty good at optimising systems.) Once upon a time processing 100,000 records would have taken a significant time.
I have my 150,000 plant records on a web site, and I’ve hit server time restrictions with some reports. (E.g. I can’t draw distribution maps for all Poaceae on a single web page. But using PHP rather than mySQL may make a difference.)
Hello Chris - and a very valued input and contribution dose the Amateur make
At the risk of speaking ones mind the i-spot concept has been very much lost by the wayside which is to help and engage people enthusiastic about wildlife natural history and its protection
There are probaly two broad user profiles
Firstly in terms of concept I would think there are this that want to use i-spot to get an answer to something they have seen or found and perhaps progres that learning using the badge scheme
Secondly those that offer identifications based o some form of pre-existing knowledge or experience tec
The danger is that i-spot has become inclusive , it does not engage the core user and I think it also has become a grab platform for people using data for there own means or as a marketing tool for the OU , whilst there is not necessarily anything wrong with that it should be remembered that they are other factors afoot ( I personally would be interested to know the budget , staffing level and resources thati-spot has )
I am sure it will not be popular in saying so In terms of its general use to date the balance of contribution form badge holders with substantive statistics in agreeing with observations from newcomers or amongst each other is low with an emphasis on making ID’s alone .
The system needs a form of overhaul
Limit the Number of ID’ pes to allow the wider community to engage and progress
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I should also add/ suugest that the number of experienced ID’ers not looking back and encouraging and approving new comers is also concerning its not all about retrying to be the first to identify , Unlike some I am not advocating how each individual should use the site - thats up to them but the point I make is for it to be sucessful it needs a change in philosphy . I-spot should be managed effectively as I state above its seems to have become a mmilking stool to elevate academics at the expense and hard work of amateurs . So , polymaths out there assert yourself British Natural History has been laid on the foundation of Amateur work and observation
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Explain???
Unlike in the UK in the southern African community 1% of users make 90% of IDs and agreements. To restrict the number of IDs would make iSpot unworkable.
If I may just jump in here Tony:
I have deleted a few (no more than 10) of my observations in the past only to repost the SAME observation a while later in the hopes that it will get more views and more (any!) Likely I.D’s. Surely this is a reasonable enough justification for deleting/ unpublishing?
I only do this with observations that have sat a month or more on iSpot without any I.D (or even comment) given. Sadly, this is actually becoming a more common occurence and is something that I have brought up with a forum topic I made about a week ago. To be honest, the reason as to why so few of our observations get the necessary attention still hasn’t been very clearly explained…
Just my 2 cents
EDIT: This was in response to your post about the ethics of deleting observations. Sorry for the confusion
The reason why is because the observer does not get notified when a change is made (track changes was removed with the update) or when anybody makes an update, so experts put in a lot of effort and nobody even looks. You can see why most people have given up…
That and all the other bugs (>500) and lack on maintenance on the site.
perhaps on your side of the globe this idea may have merit but for us in Southern Africa its a crazy suggestion, take say moths or beetles, there are no current ID books available for the amateur (that I’m aware of) so we’re totally reliant on a few experts for ID’s, the beetles for example have just 2 active experts both of whom do a sterling job including agreeing with my guesses and adding helpful and encouraging comments
Although I am not in agreement of Deleting observations, I do understand your justification. And yes there are many observations that have left without Identification, even observations that are of a good quality (that can be identified). In these cases the observation can be on page 300 (for example) and thus are likely to remain unidentified. So yes there should be a method of moving observations forward (or back into vision). We have this on one of the specialized forms, where a mere comment or Identification moves the observation to the top of the pile and back into view on the recent page. This method may not be practical on Ispot, but there is a need for a method of bringing unidentified observations forward.
To this I will state that Tony maintained pages of unidentified Taxa which many of us would browse through and identify where we could - as such there was X amount of success in keeping the unidentified observations under control. At the same time one also notes that if it still was not identified, the observation would remain so far back that it would not be noted by an occasional visit from an expert in that field.
So yes a very tricky situation where collaborative thought should be put into - but alas - current collaborative thought is concentrated on how to get Ispot working in some meaning full manor.
And yes before anyone states the need for tracking changes - that’s bloody obvious but does not alone solve the problem.
Note further that the question of unidentified observations being left behind is inherent in all CS platforms.
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Just for your information, my wife an I normally do not give an identification on a commonly known species, but rather suggest in the comments a route to the identification.
But on the other hand if you feel that the :knowledgeable and or experts should be limited - to what - maybe two identifications a day? Well great…the amount of unidentified observations may actually grow
But We expect that is not a problem factored into your theory.
Either-way, currently we are not identifying at all - so your wish is granted.
Hmm I can see what you are getting at in that a small number of active users get in first and provide an ID (I’m much less one of those than I used to be) but I’m not sure restricting their activity would encourage others to get involved. It might of course but it might just result in fewer things getting IDs and pointers on ID (and if I had to guess I think the latter is more likely than the former)
I know when I identify something (particularly if it is not an easy one) I do try to provide some commentary on how I reached the ID. This both allows to original recorder to check my reasoning and decide whether to accept it for their record as well as (hopefully) sharing something of the process to help people improve their ID skills. Encouraging that, and the original purpose of iSpot as about supporting the development of ID skills, feels important.
Of course until we have tracking of changes back it doesn’t really work to provide suggestions and comments since people will not be notified of them and I will not be notified if someone responds to anything I’ve suggested. But that’s coming back soon.
It is now over 5 years that we requested that filters should be orderable. The iSpot database should allow easy ordering - both forward and backward: it has fields for these already - by:
- date posted
- date observed
- number of agreements
- sum of reputation of the Identifiers and Agreeyers (i.e. Expert Equivalents: something that iSpot has that is unique! - but totally hidden from most users)
- number of views
- number of interactions
- date last viewed
But of course, what would also help would be filters for:
- not seen by me
- not linked to the dictionary
All these have been requested, but the programmers do not feel the need to listed to the users …
14 days and counting.
What do you mean by “soon”?