I had thought it was fixed, and certainly it seems to have been behaving normally of late. The first plant up, which looked an awful lot like Epilobium hirsutum turned out to be Oenothera rosea - which on googling turns out to be a lot more delicate than either E hirsutum or the quiz image. The next image was of the same plant. Thinking to fool the quiz, I typed in Oenothera rosea. Wrong answer…
.
That sounds like what was going wrong on the highest level before.
On googling Oenothera rosea has rounded petal apices, and Epilobium hirsutum bilobed petal apices.
Edit: A search finds a dozen Oenothera rosea observations on iSpot, from southern Africa. If you go to one of those observations, the other observations carousel seems to have rather more entries.
I don’t think ANYTHING has been done,. I have a feeling that Admin might be inside a glow of satisfaction because we have gone quiet (not forgetting the many who have gone quietly). That might look poisonous and I might regret writing it but IS ANYONE LISTENING?
If so, how about a response to REITERATING (edited 2 March) in the hyjacked thread New year 'solutions? Please?
WONDERING…
I am left wondering why you are messing with the flawed quizzes when there is so much FUN in https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/project/757764/other-organisms-without-id
Typcally
https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/global/view/observation/279010/what-is-this
or (slightly easier) https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/observation/182173/cuckoo-spit
Hurry only 876 to go…
I would…but you have to bear in mind that while I am not bad at identifying plants, I am next to useless at most other taxa. If you have any green ‘other organisms’ (other than amorphous blobs) or anything that appears to be a plant, then do send it in my direction
Quiz improvements are in the grant application we are currently writing. It is a shame that it had to be rewritten when main ispot was redone as I thought it was separate stand alone code that worked fine. They have had several goes at getting the new code to work but as you know there are still bugs and they are currently not working on it.
I wonder if the thing to do is to pull the quizes until work can resume on fixing them. Having them up but broken just gives a bad impression of the site. I’m baised of course because I never really saw them as a particularly core feature anyway so having them go wouldn’t bother me much even if they never returned.
Honestly, the quizzes SHOULD be taken down, revised, tested by those who love them, then gently returned This was suggested months, not 7d ago.
The repetitive clubmoss quiz was one we saw straight after the bit switch which gave us so many issues. The plants quiz hasn’t been working for me of late, but at least it featured a range of plants.
I agree with @dejayM - as the quiz function is the one most likely to be used by newcomers to ISpot and beginners, it really should be taken down from the site until the team are sure it is functioning properly.
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The quizzes are very disappointing. Poor choice of species (stage 2 of 5 for plants includes loads of non-native or rare species - very off-putting), poor photos in many cases, and system goes wrong and repeats photos expecting different answers. Photo of a puffball was a completely-out-of-focus white blob.