Unless it is a very old project which has been given special permission for it to take place, records are not automatically added to traditional projects, you have to manually do it.
Were these projects grandfathered in to allowing automatic inclusion of records ?
We don’t allow the aggregator to be turned on for any new traditional projects, but it should be grandfathered in if the it was put in place before April of last year. As far as I know we have never turned it off for any projects.
Hmm, for now there isn’t an replacement for the traditional project.
We have a lot of obscured plants in our region making a collection project a bit useless.
Another problem is exporting from a collection project is completely different and obscured plants are not visible.
I don’t set the rules for how projects work, that’s done by the site, just telling you what the issue is. Allowing collection projects to see obscured sightings is not going to happen, it effectively renders obscuring meaningless.
Yep and makes it useless for some like us. A traditional project works just fine, luckily we still have an old working traditional project otherwise we had probably had to abandon iNat.
Weird to abandon the traditional project without having something similar in place.
Traditional projects have not been abandoned, they are still there, including making new ones for people who want that functionality.
The auto addition of records into traditional projects was turned off well before the launch of collection projects, and was totally unrelated to their launch, it was related to the unsustainable server load it created.
As @cmcheatle says, they were never abandoned, we only made the aggregator not usable for new ones due to its heavy load on the servers. Every time an observation is added to a traditional project, we record that it is “in” the project, so that’s a lot more data in our database, and a lot more actions required of it, especially as iNat grows.
A collection project just runs a search based on attributes that are already part of the observation (eg date, taxon) and is thus significantly easier on our servers.
We’re exploring ways that make the access of obscured data more efficient to researchers, but it’s a tough needle to thread.
I’m going to mark this as “solved” as it’s not a bug, as far as I can tell, If gmoran wants to reach out about this project, they can do so at help@inaturalist.org.
I understand this is by design, but it would be nice to have something similar for new projects.
Without the obscured data, a collection project isn’t much of a research tool at least not for us.
You can’t check the ID properly without knowing where it grows and following it up is a bit hard.
