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release.txt
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release.txt
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We are pleased to finally announce a major set of new features on Mushroom
Observer! This is the result of several months of intensive development,
mostly by Jason since Nathan has been rather preoccupied by his exciting new
position as Director of Biodiversity Informatics at EOL.org (congratulations,
Nathan!). Nathan has helped with the overall design and testing the new
features.
Much of the work should be invisible to the casual user. (Outside of the
occasional bugs that we inevitably failed to catch, of course.) However, there
are some major new features that we hope will delight you. Below is a list of
the most important new developments. Our apologies if we've failed to
acknowledge your suggestions.
Enjoy!
Jason & Nathan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Voting:
Users may now make their votes public. By default all pre-existing votes are
anonymous, but starting April 5, 2010 the default will be for them to be
public. See http://mushroomobserver.org/25184 and click on the percentage
below 'Community Vote' next to the name Lichenomphalia umbellifera to see an
example of something Jason and Nathan have voted on. You can change the
visibility of your votes by going to your account "Preferences". We only
provide for either all new votes being public, or all new votes being
anonymous, although existing users have the option of grandfathering in old
anonymous votes while making all new votes public.
All users are now encouraged to vote on image quality. At Chris Parrish's
and Debbie Viess's suggestions we've deliberately omitted negative votes.
Image quality is only used to rank images in search results. Also, only
images of a minimum quality ("useful for identification") are being shared
with third-party sources, such as EOL.org. As with proposed names, there
will never be any sort of penalty for posting an image that other users
happen to dislike!
If you have javascript enabled, you will be able to vote on images directly
from most places on the site. At Alan Rockefeller's and Curtis Björk's
suggestion, we now optionally provide larger thumbnails. The thumbnail size
can be changed in your account "Preferences". Additional image sizes are
available when you click on an image, as well. As it takes longer to process
all the new image sizes, please be patient after posting observations -- you
will be seeing the cartoon Amanita more often than before.
Name and Location Descriptions:
Names (and locations) have been split into two parts: the name itself and
synonymy remains where it is; all the descriptive text has moved into an
attached object. This allows us to develop multiple descriptions for a
species, e.g., the standard public one, private drafts developed by students
for a class, descriptions extracted automatically from third-party sources,
and alternate ("personal") descriptions provided by individual users.
Each name has a "default" description. This is the old public description,
where one existed. All users will be allowed to read this description.
While it is possible to make a read-only description the default, any user
may create a fully-public description and make it the default instead.
Descriptions have three types of permissions: read, write and admin. These
are all completely customizable by admins. You automatically become an admin
for any personal descriptions you create. There are two boxes on the main
create/edit form that let you classify a description simply as readable or
writable by the general public. Use the "Adjust Permissions" tab at the top
to grant individual users or user groups any of the three types of
permissions. Public descriptions are intended to always be readable and
writable by everyone so their permissions cannot be changed except by the
site admins. In extreme cases the site admins could make a public
description read-only, but we hope that will not be necessary.
Existing drafts (for the undergraduate projects) have been transformed into
special private descriptions. Read, write and admin permissions should
remain unchanged. Drafts (and any other description) may still be
"published" whenever you are ready. In this new context, "publishing" is a
process that turns your draft into a public description and makes it the
default. If a public description already exists, you may choose to merge
your draft with it instead.
Users may now comment directly on names (and locations). Note, if you enter
a comment when approving or deprecating a name, it shows up as a comment now,
instead of being inserted into the general "Notes" field. Hopefully users
will find it convenient to use this forum to debate taxonomic issues, rather
than under the observation of the moment, where the comments are soon lost
under the mountain of new observations.
Searching:
You will immediately notice that you now have the ability, thanks to Darvin
DeShazer's and Paul Derbyshire's suggestion, to select which type or types of
activity you are interested in seeing on the main "Activity Log" page. Note
that you may set this as your default at any time.
We've made massive changes behind the scenes to how searching and indexing is
done throughout the site. One sign you will notice is that in addition to
the old "<< Prev | Next >>" tabs at the top of observation and name pages,
there is now also an "Index" link that shows you the results of the latest
index or search. All three links are now present for all types of objects.
You can now also request to see a list of names, locations or images from the
index of observation results, and vice versa. This can be particularly
useful, for example, should you like to see a list of species that you have
observed on MO -- select "Your Observations" from the left-hand panel, then
select "Show Names" from the links at the top of the resulting index.
You now have the ability to modify sort order for any of the indexes. When
sorting by name, title, or user, most indexes will allow you to jump straight
to the set of results starting with a given letter.
You may now use the search bar at the top of the page to search for comments,
species lists, and users.
Infrastructure:
Timestamps should now be reported in your local time zone, as reported by
your browser. There is, obviously, no guarantee that your browser is
reporting the correct time zone (mine isn't right now!), but it should be
correct for most users, I hope.
As usual, we've made a number of improvements in code and database
performance. (In some common cases, such as the "Activity Log" site index,
the new version takes less than half the time to respond in local tests!)
Unfortunately there are many factors involved in the overall response time of
a live production server, so it remains to be seen how much of an improvement
the average user will see. We are guardedly optimistic.
We have added the ability to synchronize with additional remote webservers.
In particular, we hope to establish a close working relationship with a clone
of MO that has been started in Russia. There is still a small amount of
testing and final development before this goes live, so it may be some weeks
before the first Russian observations start rolling in.
For those power-users out there, we have developed a powerful programatical
interface to our database. It is fully-featured: everything you can do on
the normal web interface can also be done via the API. (It is being used to
synchronize with external servers.) Please contact us if you are interested.
It is still in testing stages, as well, so we have temporarily disabled it
pending final QA.