Wildlife@Home: progress report

Hi Everyone, Just came back from the team's new weekly meetings so I'd like to let everyone know what's going on and what our current plans are for the site: 1. given our discussions and all the users comments, I should be updating the validator this evening (with any luck) which will hopefully iron out more of the kinks. If the validator is offline this evening (and probably tomorrow) that's why. 2. I've also been doing smaller some things behind the scenes which will help our biology students better enter in their expert observations and handle the reported videos. In general these are things I can get implemented a bit more quickly, so I can get them done in between running around campus going to teach and various meetings. Unfortunately, getting that validator fixed requires a larger block of undistracted time! 3. We had some minor inconsistencies with uploading the 2013 plover video and getting it added to the database -- these have been fixed -- and I added some of the backbone which will give Susan and her students more control about releasing these videos (which was required due to them being federally protected species). Also, Susan and her students have generated a list of different behavior that we'll be looking for in the plover and tern video, so I will be creating and testing new video watching pages for those species in the upcoming week(s) - along with more detailed and specific instructions for how to classify things. 4. It looks like some webpage is generating a query which is locking up the database. I need to track down the culprit to stop the recent outages. 5. Kyle has started work on the new iterations of our applications for workunits, so with any luck we'll be sending out batches of workunits soon. 6. I should hopefully have team stats set up for watched video credits, along with a webpage for that. I want to get the validator fixed before then however, as it'll be one other place credit will be being updated at. I'll be keeping you all in the loop as things progress since we really appreciate all your help and time watching videos. If there are any other concerns, things we should be looking into, or webpage functionality please let us know! --Travis

More...