Alphabetical ordering of places

General
1

I have two issues with place lists on a project. 1. On a project page, I am trying to order a list of places alphabetically. I enter each place in alphabetical order, but when I save the change, the list gets shuffled. Is there a way to order place lists on projects? The beta project is at this link.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/pollination-dc-duplicate

  1. iNat separates places with a comma and breaks up the names by placing them across more than one line–not easy to find a name in a longer list. Any way to ensure each place is on a separate line for improved usability?
2

You could copy the list of place names into the description of the project and then format it in any way you wish.

3

just out of curiosity, why do you end so many of your place names with lots of extra periods? is that an attempt to try to get place names to show up one per line?

4

If so, it would fail. Everyone has different sized monitors and browser windows aren’t always maximised either…

5

I was working out the number of characters needed to keep place names from splitting across more than one line. The combination of a list that isn’t alphabetized, and names split across more than one line makes for a frustrating visual search for a place name. I compared lists on different size screens to arrive at a reasonable compromise. On a mobile phone screen, the names take two lines, yet do not occupy a line with another place name, so even that is easier to scan for names.

6

Thanks, your suggestion would work, although it could be confusing to have two lists of place names on the same page. By making the suggestion were you confirming place name lists cannot be ordered alphabetically, or separated as one place name per line?

7

as far as I am aware, it is a filter list only and doesn’t have ability to sort it. The only other potential solution would be to have seperate projects for each place, and then combine them with an umbrella project, similar to what the CNC does:
https://inaturalist.nz/projects/city-nature-challenge-2021
This has the advantage (or disdvantage) of strongly demarcating each individual garden, which you may or may not want to happen.

I think the only confusion for the “two lists” would be if there were changes and they were not mirrored into the formatted description list. Outside of that, is there really a need to have each place listed in a formatted way? You describe them adequately in the main description (Community Gardens in DC), and if you got rid of all the weird periods in the names of the places, they would be able to be found easily enough in the list if someone was looking to see if a particular one was included. If you do mirror the list manually into the description, it would allow you to more economically display the list, such as:

DC Community Gardens included in this project:
Benning, Hillcrest, Kalorama, Langdon Youth, Lederer, LeDroit Park, Lovejoy, Marvin Gaye, Mother’s Peace Garden, Noyes, Palisades, Bruce Monroe, Douglass, Edgewood, Emery, Euclid Street, Ferebee Hope, Fort Greble, Fort Stanton, Fort Stevens, Friendship, Hamilton, Harry Thomas

note, I haven’t sorted alphabetically, but you could easily do so, or even group them by area or whatever.

8

probably the cleanest thing would be to ask staff via a feature request to order places in the project rules list on the project details page. it may or may not be useful to also ask to order the list of places on the project edit page.

short of that, you can copy the list of places and use some other tool to parse and sort. in this case, your place names don’t have commas in their names. so effectively the list of places in the project rules is just a comma separated list (which should be relatively easy to parse).

alternatively, you could use the API to get the project rules (ex. https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/projects?id=100433&rule_details=true). there are ways to do a little coding or use something like Excel to parse this relatively easily. once you have the basic structure of how you want to organize the data, you could just refresh the data any time you add or remove places.

9

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