We are pleased to finally announce a major set of new features on Mushroom
Observer!  This is the result of several months of intensive development,
mostly by Jason since Nathan has been rather preoccupied by his exciting new
position as Director of Biodiversity Informatics at EOL.org (congratulations,
Nathan!).  Nathan has helped with the overall design and testing the new
features. 

Much of the work should be invisible to the casual user.  (Outside of the
occasional bugs that we inevitably failed to catch, of course.)  However, there
are some major new features that we hope will delight you.  Below is a list of
the most important new developments.  Our apologies if we've failed to
acknowledge your suggestions. 

Enjoy!

Jason & Nathan

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Voting:

  Users may now make their votes public.  By default all pre-existing votes are
  anonymous, but starting April 5, 2010 the default will be for them to be
  public.  See http://mushroomobserver.org/25184 and click on the percentage
  below 'Community Vote' next to the name Lichenomphalia umbellifera to see an
  example of something Jason and Nathan have voted on.  You can change the
  visibility of your votes by going to your account "Preferences".  We only
  provide for either all new votes being public, or all new votes being
  anonymous, although existing users have the option of grandfathering in old
  anonymous votes while making all new votes public. 

  All users are now encouraged to vote on image quality.  At Chris Parrish's
  and Debbie Viess's suggestions we've deliberately omitted negative votes.
  Image quality is only used to rank images in search results.  Also, only
  images of a minimum quality ("useful for identification") are being shared
  with third-party sources, such as EOL.org.  As with proposed names, there
  will never be any sort of penalty for posting an image that other users
  happen to dislike! 

  If you have javascript enabled, you will be able to vote on images directly
  from most places on the site.  At Alan Rockefeller's and Curtis Björk's
  suggestion, we now optionally provide larger thumbnails.  The thumbnail size
  can be changed in your account "Preferences".  Additional image sizes are
  available when you click on an image, as well.  As it takes longer to process
  all the new image sizes, please be patient after posting observations -- you
  will be seeing the cartoon Amanita more often than before. 

Name and Location Descriptions:

  Names (and locations) have been split into two parts: the name itself and
  synonymy remains where it is; all the descriptive text has moved into an
  attached object.  This allows us to develop multiple descriptions for a
  species, e.g., the standard public one, private drafts developed by students
  for a class, descriptions extracted automatically from third-party sources,
  and alternate ("personal") descriptions provided by individual users. 

  Each name has a "default" description.  This is the old public description,
  where one existed.  All users will be allowed to read this description.
  While it is possible to make a read-only description the default, any user
  may create a fully-public description and make it the default instead. 

  Descriptions have three types of permissions: read, write and admin.  These
  are all completely customizable by admins.  You automatically become an admin
  for any personal descriptions you create.  There are two boxes on the main
  create/edit form that let you classify a description simply as readable or
  writable by the general public.  Use the "Adjust Permissions" tab at the top
  to grant individual users or user groups any of the three types of
  permissions.  Public descriptions are intended to always be readable and
  writable by everyone so their permissions cannot be changed except by the
  site admins.  In extreme cases the site admins could make a public
  description read-only, but we hope that will not be necessary.

  Existing drafts (for the undergraduate projects) have been transformed into
  special private descriptions.  Read, write and admin permissions should
  remain unchanged.  Drafts (and any other description) may still be
  "published" whenever you are ready.  In this new context, "publishing" is a
  process that turns your draft into a public description and makes it the
  default.  If a public description already exists, you may choose to merge
  your draft with it instead.

  Users may now comment directly on names (and locations).  Note, if you enter
  a comment when approving or deprecating a name, it shows up as a comment now,
  instead of being inserted into the general "Notes" field.  Hopefully users
  will find it convenient to use this forum to debate taxonomic issues, rather
  than under the observation of the moment, where the comments are soon lost
  under the mountain of new observations. 

Searching:

  You will immediately notice that you now have the ability, thanks to Darvin
  DeShazer's and Paul Derbyshire's suggestion, to select which type or types of
  activity you are interested in seeing on the main "Activity Log" page.  Note
  that you may set this as your default at any time. 

  We've made massive changes behind the scenes to how searching and indexing is
  done throughout the site.  One sign you will notice is that in addition to
  the old "<< Prev | Next >>" tabs at the top of observation and name pages,
  there is now also an "Index" link that shows you the results of the latest
  index or search.  All three links are now present for all types of objects. 

  You can now also request to see a list of names, locations or images from the
  index of observation results, and vice versa.  This can be particularly
  useful, for example, should you like to see a list of species that you have
  observed on MO -- select "Your Observations" from the left-hand panel, then
  select "Show Names" from the links at the top of the resulting index. 

  You now have the ability to modify sort order for any of the indexes.  When
  sorting by name, title, or user, most indexes will allow you to jump straight
  to the set of results starting with a given letter. 

  You may now use the search bar at the top of the page to search for comments,
  species lists, and users. 

Infrastructure:

  Timestamps should now be reported in your local time zone, as reported by
  your browser.  There is, obviously, no guarantee that your browser is
  reporting the correct time zone (mine isn't right now!), but it should be
  correct for most users, I hope. 

  As usual, we've made a number of improvements in code and database
  performance.  (In some common cases, such as the "Activity Log" site index,
  the new version takes less than half the time to respond in local tests!)
  Unfortunately there are many factors involved in the overall response time of
  a live production server, so it remains to be seen how much of an improvement
  the average user will see.  We are guardedly optimistic. 

  We have added the ability to synchronize with additional remote webservers.
  In particular, we hope to establish a close working relationship with a clone
  of MO that has been started in Russia.  There is still a small amount of
  testing and final development before this goes live, so it may be some weeks
  before the first Russian observations start rolling in. 

  For those power-users out there, we have developed a powerful programatical
  interface to our database.  It is fully-featured: everything you can do on
  the normal web interface can also be done via the API.  (It is being used to
  synchronize with external servers.)  Please contact us if you are interested.
  It is still in testing stages, as well, so we have temporarily disabled it
  pending final QA.