Taxa broken link out to Mushroom Observer

[JoeCohen]

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): 2023-05-07

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Irrelevant, but Chrome Version 112.0.5615.137 (Official Build) (x86_64)

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: Example: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/48529-Tremella-mesenterica

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/): See below

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: Go to any fungal taxa page. Example: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/48529-Tremella-mesenterica

Step 2: Under More Info, click Mushroom Observer

Result: Mushroom Observer (MO) throws an error:

Explanation and Suggestions:

The iNat link out
http://mushroomobserver.org/name/name_search?pattern=Tremella%20mesenterica
is obsolete.
The relevant url changed on the MO end. (MO has updated its controllers to use standardized Rails CRUD urls. This one was updated, but wasn’t make backward compatible. (I will fix the backward compatibility issue shortly in MO so you might no longer see this issue.))

But I nonetheless suggest several changes:

1. Use htttps, rather than http, here and in any other links out to MO.
2. Use the newer equivalent of the old link. Example:
   https://mushroomobserver.org/names?pattern=Tremella%20mesenterica
3. Instead of the above pattern search, use an MO lookup.
   An MO pattern search currently returns a list of all MO Names (taxa) with text matching the pattern. The text can be anywhere, e.g., in notes. So the results of a pattern search for x will include taxa with notes like “this taxon is completely unrelated to, and looks nothing like, x”.
   I think what was intended was a link out to the MO Name page for the taxon. In that case you should use a MO lookup. Example: https://mushroomobserver.org/lookups/lookup_name/Tremella+mesenterica

[pisum]

if you flag the taxon on the main site, i think a curator should be able to change the link.

i don’t think there’s a system bug here that needs to be handled by system developers.

[JoeCohen]

This is not a problem of a single taxon.
Rather (as far as I can tell) the taxon page for every taxon in Fungi automatically adds a number of links out in the “More Info” section.
So this does require help from a system developer.

[pisum]

my understanding is that a curator should be able to fix this for all fungi. they should be able to specify a particular pattern for a high-level taxon, like so:

[JoeCohen]

Thanks. I’ll see if I can find a curator to fix this.