Journal posts have lost formatting

https://inaturalist.nz/projects/auckland-renh-kaipatiki-creek-trial-umbrella-project/journal

I had not looked at this journal of mine for a while, so I dont know how long its been like this, but it seems all the formatting of paragraphs has been removed.

And I finally encountered someone seriously interested in engaging with it!

Does anyone know if changes to the website caused it? I have not looked into editing yet to see what can be done.
Update…I just looked at it in Edit mode and it looked normal. Here is a bit of it, copied and pasted from the Edit pageof the Journal:

"This trial aimed to

  1. demonstrate the effectiveness of manual weed control over time

  2. help establish optimal rates of weed reduction for gradual replacement of invasive plants with native wild vegetation.

NB Maximum effectiveness means maximum growth, density and diversity of native vegetation. Weeds are removed because they are inhibiting existing or potential native habitat.

So effective weed control requires assessment of the likely or potential development of native habitat, the needs of existing or potential species in that habitat, and the minimisation of soil moisture loss, habitat disturbance, erosion, soil contamination and water pollution.

  1. Assess changes since the fulltime volunteer restoration project of 1997-99, especially observable results of both intervention and non-intervention

Unless otherwise noted Observations below are limited to the defined Trial area, ie the banks below Kaipatiki Roadside, down to the stream and up the opposite bank to the forest path (“Native Plant Trail”).

1: Ongoing survey
The methodology’s attention to species identification throughout the trial helped preserve, at least temporarily, some existing native plants and invertebrates, and facilitated the beginnings of regeneration in some areas impacted both historically and recently by Reserve users, along the roadside, on the banks below, and along the forest path".

…etc. interestingly, it seems to work here?

Update again…I see that other posts, and large parts of that one, appear correctly. So I assume I have introduced an error…can anyone spot it? Its been a while since I even used that formatting, so I will have trouble remembering hiw, and getting back into it enough tomp recognise the errors.

It goes wrong after this bit…
Unless otherwise noted Observations below are limited to the defined Trial area, ie the banks below Kaipatiki Roadside, down to the stream and up the opposite bank to the forest path (“Native Plant Trail”).

1: Ongoing survey
The methodology’s attention to

And before this bit:

  1. Review

3:1 Plant health and reproduction

Both those selections are copied from the Edit page.

In the published version, the 3. Review appears as 1.Review.

if that is how it appears, does it need an extra space, or not-a-space, somewhere?

That’s what I wonder…but dont know what. I will have to review the whole formatting guide tomorrow. Bedtime now…

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I did have another look before going to bed, found the code I had used for anchors in my other Project’s report,
https://inaturalist.nz/posts/37415-methodology-trial-report-for-year-two-draft
and found that that report also has strange formatting now, but further down. And image links broken.

I dont think I made any edits to either report since finalising and publishing, and am increasingly sure it is an unintended result of some website change.

I would love to know when this happened, particularly in the case of the one linked in the OP above, as when the funders of that Trial eventually got around to reading it in early 2020, I was told they had found it too hard to understand. As I was thoroughly exhausted of it by then, having put months into making the data as clear as I could, I made no further attempt to change it, so I may not have looked at it again. I would be very embarrassed if they saw it when it looked like this…they would think I was…um…very challenged.

Final report on 2019/20 Trial of Site-based non-chemical weed control for ecological restoration

Many findings have already been reported, some in more detail, in earlier photo observations and/or text reports. Here we try to summarise our experience of the application of this methodology to a site during a single year of integrated ongoing survey, planning and intervention.

Some locations are named, eg Zone Ca, or ZoneCaKSS. Links to all the Trial Zones and locations, or “sub-zones”, are provided here.</a href>

This trial aimed to

  1. demonstrate the effectiveness of manual weed control over time

  2. help establish optimal rates of weed reduction for gradual replacement of invasive plants with native wild vegetation.

NB Maximum effectiveness means maximum growth, density and diversity of native vegetation. Weeds are removed because they are inhibiting existing or potential native habitat.

So effective weed control requires assessment of the likely or potential development of native habitat, the needs of existing or potential species in that habitat, and the minimisation of soil moisture loss, habitat disturbance, erosion, soil contamination and water pollution.

  1. Assess changes since the fulltime volunteer restoration project of 1997-99, especially observable results of both intervention and non-intervention

Unless otherwise noted Observations below are limited to the defined Trial area, ie the banks below Kaipatiki Roadside, down to the stream and up the opposite bank to the forest path (“Native Plant Trail”).

  1. Ongoing survey
    The methodology’s attention to species identification throughout the trial helped preserve, at least temporarily, some existing native plants and invertebrates, and facilitated the beginnings of regeneration in some areas impacted both historically and recently by Reserve users, along the roadside, on the banks below, and along the forest path.

1:1 Plant identification

Of special interest among species identified during the Trial were some natives often either damaged accidentally, treated as weeds due to their common occurrence in cultivated land, or misidentified as exotics they closely resemble.

Following standard practice, no plant was damaged unless it had been identified as exotic. Photographs were taken, sometimes many times until diagnostic features were successfully captured in the images uploaded to iNaturalist for discussion and species ID or confirmation by experts, particularly of ferns. Visitors made some identifications of large trees. No plant material needed to be collected for ID purposes, though some known exotics, eg a fan palm seedling and an invasive grass, were collected for closer study and photography.

With this invaluable help, we learned to recognise some species new to us, eg:

• the invasive fern Cretan brake (Pteris cretica), which was removed from several streambank locations, releasing native Blechna and Deparia

• the native Dark nightshade (Solanum opacum), found both beside the path and on sun-exposed edges of the streambank, sometimes among groups of the very similar Black nightshade (S. nigrum), which is itself a benign exotic that provides ground cover, shade that nurses native seedlings, and fruit observed being eaten by birds

• several invasive palms, after discovering the banks of the Kaipatiki Stream now hold several mature Bangalow and a Chusan, numerous Phoenix and Bangalow seedlings, and an unidentified species of Fan palm seedling.

• Calystegia sepium, x silvatica, a hybrid of the native Hedge bindweed (Calystegia sepium subsp roseata) with the invasive exotic Calystegia silvatica, ie the locally common weed often referred as convulvulus. This bindweed overtook about 20m of the 1998 roadside planting of kanuka and is still common here, though less abundant in the now-canopied areas of roadside, and possibly not harming the present vegetation.

End of quote. ( I have added no new or changed characters to the original, or additional formatting, in this forum post.) The above is a longer copied section from the edit page of the post, testing to see if the bullet points work in the
forum.

Yes they do. But why the colour is blue I dont know. That is one of the current effects of whatever has happened, in the other Project report ie https://inaturalist.nz/posts/37415-methodology-trial-report-for-year-two

Image links seem to be broken throughout both Journals.

@tiwane Can you help please? I have copies of both Journals as pdfs and the regular save-as-webarchive, made at time of publication, if that helps.

Is this not because of the inclusion of vanilla https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/ as a formatting tool?
A lot of my old journal posts (pre vanilla) are doing spectacular things.
And the preview does not work - it shows something quite different to the published version.

2 Likes

</a href> is not a valid close tag. replace the invalid tag with the proper close tag (</a>). see: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/tags-for-links-no-longer-hidden-in-about-project-pages/14273.

4 Likes

This seems likely. When did this happen? I am wondering whether my funders would have been confronted with this and not mentioned it, as in the case of the OP link it looks normal enough, then just looks at first glance like a very lazy and unskilled writer not using paragraphs Nd not knowing how to use bullet points.

Next I need to know if it is going to be remedied, as otherwise I need to decide whether to delete those posts. SUCH a lot of work went into them.

If it is just a matter of removing the “ref” from the “aref” tags I might do some of that.
I had been keeping up with the news and Updates…I thought. Maybe I missed one. @tiwane had warned me …after an earlier change that broke some things in published Journal posts…that Journals would be affected by complete change in the future…but time must have slipped by without me realising it.

Thanks pisum

This is part of the move to Amazon Open Data. Images that are Creative Commons licensed are now being hosted on a different server and we finally started deleting the duplicates on our old server. See https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/representative-pictures-not-showing-on-all-species-pages/25401/7

You’ll have to change the domain for each img_src URL from https://static.inaturalist.org to http://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com eg https://static.inaturalist.org/photos/82822264/original.jpeg should be http://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/82822264/original.jpeg That should work, as long as the photo is still attached to an observation or other content.

As for the large blocks of text, that probably has to do with our switch to markdown, which happened about a year ago.

We’ve never officially supported using iNat as an image hosting service for stuff like journal posts, so if a user uploaded an image with an observation then removing them from the observation just so they could use the image in a journal post or comment (I’m not saying you did this, @kaipatiki_naturewatc, just saying this for anyone who might have a similar issue), that photo could be gone. We recommend using an actual image hosting service if you want a place to host images for things like this.

The text formatting is due to the change to markdown support, which happened over a year ago. You probably want to start playing around with the lists you have in your posts, some are not showing up as sublists because they’re not indented. Here’s a guide to lists in markdown: https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/#lists-1 For example, try indenting your list items two spaces. Here’s what that looks like on the edit page:

I should look something like this when published:

Thank you Tony.

I updated the address for an image and it worked. Then I did another and it didn’t, and it was in a table.

What change is needed for this table?

etc–deleted text
I can’t copy the text without it changing. I tried the reformatted text button

I found a table that was working and copied that.

I have tried reading the guide you linked @tiwane but I dont see anything about paragraphs or color. I cant make sense of much of that guide unfortunately. It uses terms I dont know. Googling , eg Markdown and Color, shows me code to use if I were starting fresh, but I dont see anything to explain why text has gone blue.

Nor do I see anything about the combined effects of whatever was the previous iNat journal formatting protocols and the present ones.

The Ordered List guide is very confusing to me, eg the numbering options, what text goes where, especially in the context of my existing work which used lists within lists but without Markdown…

eg 1. Xxxxx

1:1 yyyyyyyy
1:2 zzzzzzz

  1. And so on

I dont know why there are changes of colour and loss of lists and paragraphs in the Gahnia Grove report, formatted (successfully) after I learned about the formatting options using Markdown, eg for a table and for the Contents links.

I have tried copying sections of that report into new posts and seeing if it comes right in little bits, but so far have had no success.

The image links were straightforward to update.

I will keep experimenting with short test posts, but if anyone has any clues I would appreciate suggestions.

A simple example, from https://inaturalist.nz/posts/37415-methodology-trial-report-for-year-two:

Gahnia Grove Methodology Trial Hours for 2019/20

The hours of site work for the year 2019/20 have been recorded separately

or, using preformatted text button in Forum,

<a name="hours"></a><strong>Gahnia Grove Methodology Trial Hours for 2019/20</strong>  

The hours of site work for the year 2019/20 have been recorded separately

This should appear as a “title” (Gahnia Grove Methodology Trial Hours for 2019/20) in Strong type, followed by a new paragraph.

I have tried adding two spaces at end of title line, at beginning of new paragraph, and Return for empty line/s between. Nothing restores the new paragraph in the Journal, which used to appear as it does here in the Forum…(although for some reason here in the forum part of the Name line is cut off, though I have checked and rechecked this post and the text is there between the Preformatted text characters)

I dont have a lot of confidence in applying some of the Markdown Syntax Guide directions as they frequently refer to incompatibility between applications using Markdown, and I don’t know where iNat falls in this.

eg In the Syntax guide it says

Here’s a Heading

and advises that for compatibility between applications a space should always be added before the number sign, as in this example they provide.

However, my headings work as links to blocks of text withihn the same Journal post, but if I add that space before the numbert sign they no longer work as links.

I have found that by publishing sections of the report separately, correct formatting is returned.

For some reason I am often encountering a greying out and strike through of the Save button for the editing of posts.

Has there perhaps been a change in accepted length of Journal posts?

i think it’ll be really hard to help you if there’s no way to see what you’re seeing. just for example:

  • the journal post that you referenced in your original post in this forum thread seems to be gone (or is now unpublished?)
  • the Gahnia Grove Methodology Trial Hours journal post seems to be unpublished (so that no one can see it but you).

if you’re not going to make the journal posts available so that others can see, then at least posting some screenshots would help us be able to help you.

otherwise, all your thoughts in these posts seem to be jumbled together into one indecipherable mass. what started as a thread about a journal post that did not properly separate paragraphs seems to have morphed into discussion about broken image links and questions about markdown vs html, and it seems to now be going into some question about being unable to save journal posts…

so let’s break things down:

  1. earlier, i noted that you were using an invalid anchor close tag. it’s not clear to me whether you ever fixed the invalid tag, and whether that fixed your original paragraph separation issue. did using a valid close tag resolve the paragraph separation issue?
  2. tiwane noted the issue about image URLs changing, and you confirmed that you understood the issue here. so this seems to be resolved.
  3. you can’t always mix html and markdown in the same block. if you’re going to do markdown in a particular block, then do markdown. if you’re going to do html, then do html.
  4. it would be helpful to see screenshots of “greying out and strike through of the Save button for the editing of posts”.

My earnest apologies @pisum. Yes, I unpublished both for a while as I had made test changes that made them appear even more incomprehensible. They are now published again. Here are the links in case they have changed:
The Journal Post referenced in the original post here: https://inaturalist.nz/projects/auckland-renh-kaipatiki-creek-trial-umbrella-project/journal/31715-final-report
https://inaturalist.nz/projects/gahnia-grove-site-summary-and-discussion/journal/37415-methodology-trial-report-for-year-two

Indeed. An excellent summary of my present experience.

Well this problem is affecting my ability to test changes. If anyone knows a possible reason for posts not being able to be saved it would help streamline my testing and reduce one strand of the aforementioned indecipherable mass:)

Helpful, thanks. Now I need to learn which parts of my posts are html. Everything I did prior to adding Lists and the Contents section, presumably? eg image links, links to iNat projects and Observation sets…so I will now go through those and remove any a href closing tags.

Next time I get the greying out of the Save button I will screenshot it.

Thanks!