Replacement for Traditional projects

Are there any plans to add features that were abandoned going from traditional to collecting projects.
The lack of showing obscured locations in a project is a problem to do anything meaningful with iNat.

I’m not against obscuring locations, far from that.
But when someone joins a project and sets allow curator to see obscured observations.
If should be possible for the project manager and curators to see the real location.

One of the reasons we ID thousands of plants is to know the location and get a map that shows what plant grows where.

This sounds like a question rather than a specific request so I moved it to #general.

I’d have to disagree with this assessment.

  • curators (and I write this as one of the most active curators on the site) should have no reason to see obscured sightings. Nothing in the role of a curator requires access to this information, and it opens too many doors for potential abuse
  • even more than this, project creators / admins of collection projects should not have rights to see obscured records. This would effectively render obscuring useless as any user could create a project, in many cases with absolutely no indication that it has been done to gain access to the obscured locations

Between traditional projects and trusted users frameworks, there are tools to address this. Users should never face a situation where if they enter an obscured sighting, another user has the ability to simply override that without their approving it.

Sounds like efmer is referring to project curators granted access to view coordinates, not general site curators.

@efmer, can you be more specific, with examples, of features that are missing in traditional projects, or instances where you as a project curator of a traditional project have been granted permission to view coordinates but are unable to?

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The ‘old’ traditional projects are just fine.

The problem is you can no longer create traditional projects the way they used to work, like automatically adding new observations.
I do understand the reason, but that makes the collections project that much less useful, or even not useful at all for some plants.

It would be nice to have a way to join a project and see obscured locations. That is if the observer allows this.
Most observers love to join a project that actually uses the observations they add.
We often go into the field, to verify observations. In itself a daunting taks as a lot of observations aren’t as accurate as they seem to be.

you can create one of each type of project, and have them both aggregate under an umbrella project. The collection type picks up automatically, and the traditional you have to manually add, and I think there are settings to allow the “owner” of such a project to see the true pin location. Outside of that setup, you really need to be talking to the owners of the observations, perhaps they will let you know actual locations if you explain why you need them :)

That doesn’t solve much, I can do a search of the same area and get the data that way.
Making 2 more projects will get very confusing.
I ask to join a project but can’t ask users to add a couple of hundred plants manually.

In that case I think Chris is right… and further, I think it was part of the reason for the change to the projects, in order to make it more difficult to obtain obscured locations, or at least to better control access to them. My solution above was just intended to give you a way to minimise the amount of observations that would need to be manually handled, I didn’t realise you wanted it to be effortless…

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I know you want to help, so never take things personal.
We put in a lot of work in iNat, so I wouldn’t call it effortless. The whole point of computers is to remove simple manual work, so we can do other more useful things, like using the actual data.
The main problem stays with obscured observations, no matter how much manual labor we put in.

in terms of the earlier comment about obscured observations messing with range maps, i do wish there were a way to turn those off, or else at least make the symbols remain different when you zoom out further. It would solve some of this problem.

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