iSpot & EML project blog

This week has been mostly occupied with configuring the back-up and recovery server solution. Although this has consumed a fairly sizeable chunk of time things have been going smoothly and there should only be a day or so of time left to spend configuring this. The result is that we should have a complete back up and disaster recovery solution for iSpot that we should be able to switch to fairly easily and quickly. Backups are going to be taken of the live site (files and database) at hourly intervals, so in the event of needing to implement the disaster recovery solution, the maximum amount of user data that we would potentially lose is one hour’s worth.

Richard G has also spent some time implementing some changes on the ‘Content of interest that has changed page’. I have been preparing a code for a change next week (Tuesday 1st December) after which time the XML files produced by iSpot as a result of S159 student submissions will now be picked up via a web service call from Moodle. This will remove the email and manual import procedure.

I have also spent a small amout of time looking at spam users. As well as potentially using the http://www.stopforumspam.com/api service to check for spam users on our exisiting database I noticed that many of the spam users have been registering with the same first and last name. After running a SQL query to find users that meet this criteria the query returned 249 results (i.e. different users). After manually checking through this data it appears that these were all spam users. A new database table has been created to hold spam users and these 249 records have been removed from the live users table on to the spam users table. I came up against a problem when testing the functionality to call the stopforumspam.com api in that there is a maximum daily call limit (from a given IP address I presume) to the API. I hit this limit during development today which resulted in me not being able to continue testing as I would have hoped. I hope to have the module to check the stopforumspam.com database when users register on iSpot put live on Monday or Tuesday of next week.

This week has seen the overhaul of the changes page in the My spot area of the site. It now has the ability to allow users to filter the list of changes by their type of link to each observation, so now they can choose to see any combination of the following:

• Observations authored by them
• Observation that they’ve commented on
• Observations on their favourites list
• Observations they’ve added an identification to
• Observations where they’ve agreed with an identification

The results are then displayed in sections depending on the nature of the change that’s taken place. The possible sections are:

• Core observation details edited by others
• Comments added by others
• Identifications added by others
• Identifications that have been agreed with by others

I’m now just working on adding a bit more help text to the page to try and improve the instructions to the users on what everything does.

The MegaLab officially stopped gathering data as of 31st October. This does not mean that the site is no longer available, in fact it’s business as usual for the Evolution MegaLab but it does mean that analysis has now begun on the data that has been collected to date. So to help with this I’ve added two new fields to the full data download that’s available to privileged users, these are: an id field that gives a unique reference to every line of the download, and the date the record was published – this is different from the date the record was made.

It’ll be interesting to hear the outcomes of the data analysis!

This week has seen the addition of links to both EOL and the NBN in iSpot. These links have been added to all identifications that have a valid taxon name in the NBN species dictionary, the scientific name is given precedence but if the scientific name is invalid and there is a valid English name then that is used instead. At present these links are only created once the identification has been published but I feel these links may be a good aid prior to publishing an identification and so it may be a good idea to look into how best to let users use these resources separately from publishing identifications.

As well as these links being added some of the other things that we’ve also done are as follows:

• Rich has added more custom reports for use by the iSpot team including User statistics which has some interesting information
• The active S159 students now have a badge so they can spot each other on the site
• it’s now possible to view who’s agreed with an identification, this still needs a bit of work to get the popup using a fixed size box and then the use of a scroll bar but it’s usable for the time being
• many small improvements to both the look & feel and functionality spread throughout the site!!