Temporary fix: I changed the link to ALA for all “Life” to the search page for ALA.
If there is a way to insert individual taxon names in the iNat link to ALA, I don’t know how to format that.
@kueda I think I screwed up the ALA link for everything. How can that be resolved to allow that “More Info” link to ALA to send customized requests from any taxon page?
When did those links last work? If memory serves from dealing with this on Wikipedia, ALA changed their URL format and all their database identifiers, breaking all incoming deep links, so the problem may not be your edit.
It don’t think it shouldn’t be possible for a user to make this kind of change (ie, accidentally breaking all links to a specific website) - if it is possible, some aspect of this would be a bug that would need to be fixed.
I changed the link to go to https://bie.ala.org.au/search?q=[NAME]. Not sure where it went before or if there is a better solution as I never use these links (knowing it’s a gamble as to whether the website even has a page for the taxon). I don’t think there are any bugs here.
one alternative—which might potentially be what the template was previously (which could explain the flag on Eublemma abrupta that led to this situation, since this template would’ve thrown up an error message in that particular case; see below)—is https://bie.ala.org.au/species/[NAME_].
in most cases, this automatically redirects to the ALA page for a taxon with that name. there are some notable exceptions, though, including any plant infraspecific taxon, any animal species/subspecies in a genus with ALA-recognized subgenera, and subgenera/sections/etc. in general* (plus any taxon where the taxonomy doesn’t match between iNat and ALA and the iNat name isn’t in ALA as a synonym of the corresponding ALA name, but that’s not unique to ALA); instead of the relevant taxon page in ALA, these will lead to an error instead. (hemihomonyms also pose problems.) given those issues, maybe it’s best to just leave it as your link to the search page?
*(in these cases, the taxon name codes[?] in ALA are usually formatted in ways other than Genus_species/Genus_species_subspecies/Subgenus alone/etc. the way they’d be autogenerated from the iNat template: infrageneric ranks are typically Genus_Subgenus in animals or Genus_subg_Subgenus/Genus_sect_Section/etc. in plants; animal species/subspecies in a subgenus are typically Genus_Subgenus_species/Genus_Subgenus_species_subspecies; plant infraspecies are typically Genus_species_subsp_subspecies/Genus_species_var_variety/etc.; and so on.)
@cthawley most (if not all) of the external links under the More Info sidebar on the About tab of any given taxon page are automatically generated from templates that often apply across broad swathes of life, and trying to edit one of those links brings you to the overarching template, so it’s unfortunately very easy for a curator unaware of how those work to accidentally mess up all the links to a given website for all relevant taxa in a single edit.
Thanks, yes, I would consider this a bug - I find it hard to believe that it would be intentional functionality to have a system that can have such a simple error break so much functionality (though I am glad this has been fixed!). Maybe it would be better as a feature request to fix/change this, but I’m not clear on what exactly would be preferable (only allowing access to the template to staff, making a popup when anyone tries to change the template saying that they are changing the template and not the specific link?)
I’m thinking just prevent changing a template link to a non-template link. Templates do often need to be edited to reflect changes to the URL structure of external sites. But once a taxon link is set up and saved as a template, no one (except maybe the creator and staff) should be allowed to save edits that remove all template code.