If I recall correctly the “Who’s online” used to just show (a sample) 10 people who were logged in regardless of how many were logged it, but did report higher numbers of logged in users when they occurred. It’s possible the the new site is erroneously displaying the number of displayed users rather the number of currently logged in users.
I also recall that yhe number of guests was often larger than the number of users (especially after midnight)… My interpretation is that a guest is someone who has searched for a particular organism on the internet, and has been directed to an iSpot observation page by a search engine,
Correct. I assume that the long list of up to 57 users was reduced by a programmer last week to the traditional 10 users, but a cock-up means that it reports only 10 users, when it should be 10 shown and the actual number logged on. When I ran a course last week, the 10 users that were logged online did not include any on the course (which is a pain, as I usually use the who’s online to assign badges (except badges dont work like that anymore, but at least it allowed me to see how to spell their usernames)).
It also shows the same 10 for quite long periods: in the good old days it changed every few seconds - whenever you went to another page it was a different 10 of the total set - I was told those who had last opened a page…
The number of guests includes bots and google search engines: “instances” on iSPot as well as people not logged in…
Quite interesting to know how YOU use this facility and to find out that Search engines and bots are seen as visitors. Are spammers (spam has dropped off dramatically) trapped by this ‘logging’ system?
Yes, but I am getting complaints of images and observations no longer visible on google. Our southern African data which featured prominently on Google-searches has now vanished.
This is frustrating and peeving off many southern African users - including many not even registered with iSpot (but who used to use iSpot a lot because of the links).
Why has the OU shut off iSpot from the outside world?
WHAAT! What the hell! Why on earth did they allow this-perhaps the only way people from the outside found iSpot. I am completely pissed off right now. All my observations of herps that are not often found showed up on google image searches and could benefit the greater community-now they are completely isolated on some crappy website link that no-one will visit.
Glad to see that you are thinking laterally. It may simply be that google is looking at all these pages as new pages and they will need to be visited for Google to rank them high enough to display.
So, assuming that Google is not locked out of the new site, it will take a while before iSpot features on Google again.
And we can blame the new urls. Had the new site kept the old urls, then there would have been no change on Google.
Because no one is seeing it on Google at present, there are going to be not hits from Google and it will be up to us as the iSpot users to advertise the site to locals and to click on as many observations and projects as possible so that Google will display them.
And of course, until we get changes back, why would we do that?
Can anyone think of a cheat or shortcut to speed up the process? Perhaps create a little bot on your computer that randomly opens and closes iSpot pages? Would that work? Or is Google aware of that and requires a little more sophistication: such that different people have to visit the pages?
So these are pictures from the old iSpot, stored on Google for fast access. If you open the website, the url is remapped by iSpot to the new site.
So (many/most/all of) these are not from the new iSpot.
Note that as these are not revisited (they cannot be revisited: they dont exist), they will slowly disappear from Google.
So, yes, you are correct, I should have stated
“images and observations are becoming no longer visible on google” (or more precisely: “images and observations from the new site are not visible on google”, or more cunningly “our images on Google are from the old site and are slowly vanishing, but images from the new site are not appearing on Google”).
See Alex’s observation below. He suggests that I should perhaps have said (and the UK curator agrees with this):
“our images on Google are from the old site and are slowly vanishing, but images from the new site are not yet appearing on Google”
The cynic in me says that I have yet to see any evidence for the “yet” …
The trouble is, I can’t remember what the old version of iSpot was like exactly. Now when I look at the gallery and hover the cursor over a picture, it only tells me the title of the post. Before, didn’t it tell you what that post had been identified as? So you had the option of going in for an agreement/disagreement or just moving on. Now you have to open every one to see if someone has identified it.
I hope so. A random check on another search engine (duckduckgo.com) produces lots of iSpot images for a couple of taxa I searched for which perhaps suggests this is an issue with how Google updates its searches when site designs change.
Old hyperlinks still point to the current site (so to grab one of mine at random http://www.ispotnature.org/node/863279 which is an old style URL redirects to the correct entry on the new site) so hopefully most links from search engines will still get people here if they follow them.
But the old links will gradually vanish as they will never be visited anymore.
The question is whether the new iSpot will ever appear on Google? Or are there too many bugs?
PEARLS
Some material from the Dysfunctional Site is trickling into Search Engines. But very few Observations.
Remember this (before my time)? http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/bioobsprojblog/2007/01/ - they must have been the friendly days. There some real pearls in there, worth copying because the new team may take this old Blog down as it is far too infmative (the cynic in me)
I agree, I think it showed the name of the likely ID when hovering over it. I noticed it today and it is very annoying-especially since I name most of my observations ‘frog’ or something and then rely on the ID to hold the useful information.
Oh, I see. The 7 year old link. An OU Link that still works would be rare.
It was to an OU Blog, possibly about iSpot and must have been interesting then
Here is a link with several thousand sub links - none seem very interesting (to me)
