Would there be a way to add a banner warning thing (like the bar for system outages) but at a taxonomic level? Clearly I am thinking about the Agraulis/Dione issue right now where it’s going to take a good long while to roll out (and revert I think) and generates a lot, truly a lot, of notifications. Like there are the taxon swap notes, then folks trying to make the change manually (maybe an active identifier), and now folks responding to that (casual posters, for ex).
I feel like, as a frequent identifier and observer, I could see something was either just going to be slow or odd and decide to wait. But for a lot of folks, they’re not going to know. So i was wondering if it’s possible to have for a taxonomic level such as Agraulis v. to put a warning on the observation page, the species page, and the identification box that it’s undergoing a taxon swap that may take X amount of time? Especially with a common species, if there’s a way to put a note up that would reach casual observers and frequent identifiers to say the best course of action is to wait, that would be fantastic. It is a lot of notifications.
@thomaseverest i think that feature request is more about curators? which also would have been good here from what i’ve read.
so i am not sure the current taxon change notifications on the dashboard really let people know what they need to do, if anything, or if folks see that before hitting the identification page. i did not see the notification on my dashboard for the change - it was buried in everything else and then was absolutely buried by agraulis changes made by other people. i know where to look for the taxon changes and the flags, but i don’t think we can expect that for most people. and i do think taxon changes are not frequent for most users.
as an observer:
i see a change in a gulf fritillary obs as part of the swap that puts it back in Needs ID, what do i do? nothing. the IDs will be eventually consistent, it is fine. just wait. (and i think this is true even if someone else has manually made the swap?)
i see the notice for the taxon swap and mine have not changed and i think they should have because it has never taken time before, what do i do? nothing. this might take up to a week, just wait.
as an identifier:
i see something is now an Inactive taxon and there are now observations flipped to Needs ID, should i do something to put those back to research grade? no, just wait.
afaik, no one needs to do anything, just wait. even if it looks wrong to have all of the identifications on my butterfly observation turned red and maverick, it is fine. just wait.
having a banner that goes up on the pages/pop-ups for the affected taxon when the taxon swap is accepted to let people know that this process will take some time, no action is required, would be great. having it disappear at the end (obviously) would let people know that the process has completed and now if something is wrong with observation, it’s time to see about correcting it.
i get that this is unusual. that’s part of what makes it an issue. we don’t regularly see this, what do we do. wait.
The unusual thing is that the swap is being undone. Reverted changes are pretty rare and cause all the wonky stuff you’re mentioning.
But this sounds like a good request to me. I just don’t know if it would have helped in this case because the swap is in the process of being reverted, not committed.
I’m the one who started the flag originally. If I had just waited, there would have been no flag; I started it because I saw the “inactive taxon” without a replacement taxon.
