I noticed a few changes that had been made to the system yesterday, and wanted to pass them on if you weren’t aware of them.
1. Photos in “Disputed” status no longer appear in the Public Gallery’s “Not Yet Classified” view. I think that’s probably a good change; it means that most of the time, us yahoos constantly reloading the “Not Yet Classifed” view will get a quick page load that doesn’t use much of the server’s resources. It also means, though, that a new shot that quickly gets ID’d incorrectly, or that falls quickly into “Disputed” status, can slip in there without your noticing. So it’s probably a good idea to check the “Show All” view, or at least the “Disputed” view, from time to time.
2. There seems to be some kind of throttling going on, where certain kinds of actions (like submitting a new ID) take much longer than they used to. Again, I assume that’s a response to the usage patterns of us competitive types who are (in my case) opening up a dozen tabs in my browser with all the newly available images, and then banging through them entering identifications as fast as I can in a (mostly vain) effort to beat wyoming to the punch.
3. Finally, I don’t know if this is actually new, or if I just overlooked it before, but there is some extensive information about the CONE SF system’s development in the pages linked to from the big black “Jump To” box on the “About” page. I especially liked the Credits page, where I was able to learn trivia like the last names and project roles of my heroes bryce and patti. There also are some cool photos with shots of the whiteboard design sessions as the system was being planned. As someone who works in web software development, I really got a kick out of that.
Thanks for the information, I thought it was my computer taking along time and I was about ready to get a new one. Does anyone get logged out and have to log back in ? I get that almost everyday. anyway thanks for this site , I love it!
Yeah, I have that experience, too. It’s one of two things I really dislike about the throttling (or whatever it is). It seems to happen to me most often when I accidentally try to submit an ID twice for the same image. I seem to end up doing that when I switch from Safari (which will interpret an Enter keypress when the bird-name-completion thing is going on as calling for an actual submission of the form) to Firefox (which requires two Enter keypresses, one to load the name into the form widget, and a second to actually submit). I get in the habit of hitting the Enter key twice to submit the ID form when I’m using Firefox, then keep accidentally giving an extra keypress when I’m using Safari. And bam, I get the error message, and have to re-log in.
The second thing I really dislike about the throttling is that it makes it hard to quickly discard unwanted images when a bird I really want to get a shot of is in the camera’s field of view. Loading the “My Gallery” page seems to take a fair amount of time now, and when I’m trying to rapid-fire a bunch of shots while a good bird is on-camera, it can be really frustrating to have to wait for the My Gallery page to come up so I can delete the rejects when I hit my daily limit.
[…] The second disability is one that the game acquired on May 7. I talked about it some in System Changes. Basically, since that time, certain operations take a lot longer than they used to. In particular, loading the My Gallery page, and entering an ID on an individual photo page, can sometimes take a very long time. […]