General Site Suggestions

Is site competing w/ iBird Pro?

luv2bird — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:49:48 GMT

I'm asking really informal questions but please don't read into it at all. I haven't been an active member for several months. When I returned to the forums recently I noticed a steep decline in participation from users on Whatbird. My questions are:

Are existing and new users on the forums receiving adequate help with site issues, feedback, and expert IDs from the site moderators? Do you think Whatbird's focus has shifted to assist persons who use the $30 iPhone application - iBird Explorer Pro?

The problems I had... so you can learn from them.

Oil_Painter — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:33:32 GMT

I found your site in a search to identify a bird I'm about to paint (I'm an Oil Painter.)

On inspection, I learned I needed to "Join"-- no problem, or so I thought.

After many, many attempts to join, I continued getting the message that my email address was already in use... or that my username was already selected.

After using BOTH email addresses and receiving the little red message on your form that tells me it is already in use...

And, after using several forms of the username I tried to use, I gave up and tried to "Contact" you.

THEN-- I had a very difficult time contacting you... my letter never appeared to get through.

I eventually gave up (after approx. 10 tries to JOIN and 4-5 "contact" attempts) and decided to check my email and get back into the studio. Then, lo and behold... I found out that I did indeed JOIN and I joined under each username... several times.

Something is out of whack with your joining form because with every attempt it told me that something is wrong. You need to check this out because I am a kind, patient person and was VERY frustrated.

Does it have anything to do with the fact that I am on a Macintosh? Using Safari?

stop spamming!

ladybughug — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:27:39 GMT

geez why is it so **** hard to remove oneself from these forums!

No longer receiving e-mail replies to posts

Jean Chang — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 04:32:54 GMT

When I write a post on the "Help me identify a bird" forum, I always check to send me an e-mail if there are replies. I always used to get them, but for the past few weeks, I no longer do. If I go to the site, I find that there are responses to my posts, but I'm not getting any e-mail notification of them.

Jean

FAQ

birdseye — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:09:09 GMT

I think you need to create a FAQ tab on the top of the main page, along with Home, Bogs etc...every 2 days someone asks "how do i post a photo", or "i am getting this or that message when i try to post"...etc... i think it would help eliminate some of the new peoples anxiety about getting involved...thanks..but this is still the best birding site on the web, no doubt

Comments on specific birds

Matt — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:10:36 GMT

The opening line in this forum is: Use this forum to make comments on specific birds. All birds in the Birds of North America database are listed.

Two observations,

1) not all birds are listed, examples are Gray Jay, Ross's Goose, Snow Goose

2) it would be real nice if we could post pictures to this forum

An active moderator

lyceel — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:11:16 GMT

The forums here are generally good. In some ways they are a bit unintuitive to use, but not terribly so.

The biggest impediment I think is that there isn't an active moderator to police posts, act on user suggestions and generally fix problems. For example, e-mail notifications have recently broken, and no one has come forward to fix them yet. Also, there have been several malicious users that have posted spam messages, and these have yet to be cleaned up. Finally, many users have created legitimate posts that have been flagged for approval by a moderator, but those messages have never been released.

Several of us have talked about this in various threads, but I just thought I'd put it out there in the off chance that Those In Charge might pick it up. It seems that the forums have been set up to run themselves, and this works to an extent, but an active moderator would make things work better, in my opinion.

I'm new here... having trouble figuring things out.

Oil_Painter — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:43:04 GMT

Hi, I'm new here and having trouble figuring things out.

Things I wish were easy access in your subject headers (a click of a button) without searching for these:

FAQ's

Create/Change my profile

Create my photo album (I think I saw this somewhere but can't find it again)

Identify this Bird

Also, how do I know if someone has responded to my post?

These are all things that I am trying to do as a new member and am having a difficult time figuring out how your website works. These are the websites I am familiar with and wish yours operated more like theirs (just so you know):

Flickr.com

SparkPeople.com

Facebook.com

I'd like to change my profile but no longer have time to figure out how to do this. My suggestion would be to

(1) Put a link into the email I received telling me I have successfully "joined"

(2) put an easy-access button for me to click on at the top of your website page

Thanks, and all the best!

Camille Engel (a.k.a. Oil_Painter)

NEW VIRUSES ARE POPPING UP

luv2bird — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:13:06 GMT

This site has a virus problems and add on errors galore. I posted earlier but don't know what happened to it. Snowyowl and I were posting simultaneously when my browser froze. Scary that I could see his screen for a moment like I was him. I logged off immediately. I'm an ethical person (thank goodness) but someone with no scruples could have easily compromised his account. It isn't safe to have this occur regularly. Scripting errors, auto-add ons without authorization, and potential access our PCs from remote servers are very critical system failures. I know everyone at Whatbird has been working diligently to correct the past virus problem but this is beyond AVG software. Someone needs to step up the security measures. I went through steps but see code on one of Matt's post (if you follow the "lunch" thread) which is still tehre now. A site for "megasizzle" pops up trying to add on to the Whatbird browser window. I tried to report on Friday about a PUP getting blocked by my AV software called mysqld-nt. I noticed it tried to gain unauthorized access by trying to add scripting dictionaries in five languages. Other problems have been reported such as the use of Adobe acrobat and Reader, any older versions of PDF link (Mozilla) software, Quicktime for BonJour, and other platforms, also IE 7 & 8 spellchecker program Whatbird users can download from this site as an add on are infected. I uninstalled everything related to the add-ons and your browser.

WAS VIRUS ATTACHED TO THIS SITE

n2gzs — Wed, 20 May 2009 12:21:57 GMT

I have noticed the last three times I've logged on here that McAfee caught and deleted a virus. It is a Trojan called J/S Exploit-Iframe. Make sure your virus protection is updated and do a spyware sweep. There are some nasty people out there.

sandhill crane illustration

larrym82 — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:56:37 GMT

Hi,

I'm just an amateur, but either the female sandhill crane has a different crown and cheeks than the male, or I'm looking at a bird that I can't find in WhatBird. In all respects, the bird appears to be a sandhill crane except that its cheeks are white and its crown black! Also, the bird I've seen sits perched on a short pole sticking up in the middle of a marshy pond.

I guess my suggestion is to include as many "Variants" pages as possible!

WhatBird "stalling"...

FlipaBird — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:35:49 GMT

I just thought I'd mention that when I click to go to a different page on whatbird, it stalls for up to 15 - 20 seconds more often than not. I noticed that if I keep clicking, sometimes it will load like it didn't recognize the click before. But I know clicked properly because it will say "loading...". It's not so much a hassle except when I'm trying to post. Clicking more than once does nothing so I just have to wait it out. I've been noticing this since I signed up about a week ago. I'm not having this problem with other sites so I thought it should be brought to your attention.

what the forum really should do next most of all.... atleast in my mind

Erich Birder — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:48:53 GMT

here is what i think

i have a comment and not really a suggestion

i think this might be just because i am a kid and i dont fully understand everything but at times this site discurrages me

it seems that not much attention is ever paid to most of the other threads and topics in this forum except the ones under help identifying and i am a member of a few other forums for different things including computer games and they are full of a plethera of different topics full of commotion and activity..... in the months i have been a member here i have seen very little fourm activity in mostly anything other than identification and feel that somehow thats just not right

i mean noone wants to share anything that has happened while they were birding..... people they have met, places they have been, and of cource the birds they have seen..... now i have nothing against novices or just people who are greatly puzzled and focused on what a bird is even if it turns out to just be a juvinile tuted titmouse or a bluejay with a bare head due to an illness

but it seems that much of the activity on this fourm is spent on these simple identifications and little on some of the other things..... yes i do understand that this is whatbird with an emphasis on what

but here is my suggestion..... taking someof the emphasis off of WHAT and make it more on the BIRD part as a bird website aswell

and if you think i am just a bratty kid now i am not..... i have birded in the Galapagos, Australia, Europe, Cape May with Pete Dunne, and this spring i am goin to Hawaii so i am a serious birder i think i know what a good prosporous birding website should be set up....... and if you listen thankyou for hearing me out on this

Motion Avatars

FlipaBird — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:46:47 GMT

It'd be nice if they worked on here.

Agree/Disagree

LWS — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:14:02 GMT

Have you considered putting Agree and Disagree buttons on the forum. Sometimes I want to agree with a bird identification without having a lot of words to add.

Browser pages are messed up

luv2bird — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:51:47 GMT

Weird looking encoding appears this week when I login or browse even when I'm not logged in. I worry because of the worm outbreak going around. On my home PC I have a anti-virus program, firewall protection, anti-phishing, and private browsing filters. I wanted to bring it up because while using the compose feature twice the windows took a really long time to load. Last night while uploading photos the save buttons would disappear or the tree view would display even though I've changed my preferences after uploading photos. Today my post freezes in the middle. I see the funny looking characters on the top right of the whatbird window where the tag lines normally are displayed. What's going on?

Error: Herring Gull vs California Gull

chicken — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:42:15 GMT

On the Herring Gull Behaviour page it is erroneously compared to the California Gull .I have cut and pasted the faulty segment below:

Similar Species

Herring Gull: California Gull is larger, has pink legs, yellow eyes, paler back, and thicker yellow bill. Ring-billed Gull is much smaller, has yellow legs, and a complete black ring on the bill.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Ability to sort Galleries by Username

Jim Penny — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:11:10 GMT

It would be helpful to have the ability to sort the Galleries by username in alphabetically order. Too difficult to find older Galleries.

!!!Comments on Specific Birds section missing at least two entries!!!!

Horseface — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:37:47 GMT

Painted Bunting and Pine Siskin are nowhere to be found in that forum. I'd post em but there's no option :(

edit: Tried to delete this post cause I found Pine Siskin but it expired. Still didn't show up in my search though for some reason!

Test post

Whidden — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:34:34 GMT

I'm doing a test post here,

I made a thread Monday, trying to identify some birds, it said it was pending approval from a mod,

then my thread never showed up. But I have seen other threads show up since then.

Just seeing if that was a glitch or if I'v been banned and don't know it.

Illustration Guide

KingstonOntarioBirder — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:17:09 GMT

Does this site use actual photos from members in the illustration guides.

Cannot change private email address

T_L_Bryant — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:30:06 GMT

I have gone to this tab and tried to change my private email address (the one I used when I originally signed up) numerous times, but when I hit the save changes button all I ever get is OOPS!. This email is no longer good and I need to change it. What to do?

Incorrect Range Map for Blue-winged Warbler

Paralogy — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:40:09 GMT

Hello.

The Range Map on the Blue-winged Warbler page is actually the Range Map for the Black-chinned Sparrow.

Hope this helps.

Thanks.

a way to narrow down by deleting birds from the list you know don't work

roundywaves — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:56:20 GMT

For example, when I was looking for a bird based on the song-. I knew the bird lived in New York. I knew it lived in forests. And that is really all I knew. So I narrowed it down with those two pieces of information. But there were still 146 birds left to look through! If I could remove ones I knew didn't fit(for example, all the birds whose songs I was familiar with, and the birds I researched and found unlikely to match) then I could keep narrowing it down until I had only a few that were possible. Maybe there is a way to do this and I just don't know about it. Or maybe something like this is too hard to program in. But I thought it might be an idea. I know that this wouldn't solve all the problems of identifying birds by their songs since some of them have many that are not recorded, but I know it would have helped when I was looking for the bird that sang the ovenbird song.

Thanks for making this website available. I have learned so much!

Expert search crash

wolf21m — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:04:17 GMT

While working in the bird expert tool:

Birds in Idaho >

Birds in Idaho with All-purpose bills >

Birds in Idaho with All-purpose bills and Black iris colored eyes >

When I click on "Black" I get the following error:

Server Error in '/BirdExpert' Application.

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Source Error:


An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the
current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of
the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
   IdIt.Filtering2.Filter.calcFilterMask() in C:\Documents and Settings\rick\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\IdIt\code\ID IT\Filtering2\Filter.cs:100
   IdIt.Filtering2.Filter.set_Tables(LookupTables value) in C:\Documents and Settings\rick\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\IdIt\code\ID IT\Filtering2\Filter.cs:57
   IdIt.Filtering2.FilterCollection.Add(Filter f) in C:\Documents and Settings\rick\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\IdIt\code\ID IT\Filtering2\FilterCollection.cs:53
   WizardModule.BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e) in C:\Documents and Settings\rick.AGILETECH\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\whatbird.root\WizardWAP\Old_App_Code\WizardModule.cs:83
   System.Web.SyncEventExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() +92
   System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) +64