Hi everyone! 

It's been a very busy year of development on the WILDLABS Platform but one with not many of these updates from me. This is mostly due to much of it being behind-the-scenes work that's hard to write about (I'll try below!), or huge, exciting projects and features that are launching in 2024. But I felt an update on some of the major changes we have implemented this year was due so here that is.

Before we go on to the main Platform, it's no longer a secret that we've been working with the WILDLABS Team on building The Inventory: a collaborative conservation technology wiki you'll soon see a lot of if you haven't already joined as a beta tester.

I thought, pretty sensibly given its scope, that the WILDLABS Platform itself was the most feature-full web project you could build, and then The Inventory came along and it's taken things to a whole other level. I'm so proud of what we've built for it and I'm so excited to see it launch and grow; with the entire sector benefiting from a place to find and collaborate on the tools needed to protect the world's life.

I'm looking forward to writing more about The Inventory next year, but there's a great overview of it and how you can get involved by the WILDLABS Team over at https://wildlabs.net/discussion/introducing-inventory-rise-conservation-tech-wiki

We've also got another major WILDLABS Platform feature launching very soon that will have a big impact on the community and its members' contributions. And it's fun. But more of that another time... 🦡

Onto those core platform updates:

Performance

With thousands of database queries, media and more pulled into every part of the site, tuning performance on the WILDLABS Platform has been one of the hardest challenges. I was going to run through an example of just how much information there is aggregated on a page (group statistics, user info, bookmarks, reactions, comments...) but it's a lot and I gave up. So I'll instead just mention some of the things we've done to speed things up over the year.

• Images have been compressed and automatically resized to a far better level than before throughout the system to reduce loading times
• We've cut down the amount of pings back and forth to the server to check for notifications and other live updates (an amusing major change was only checking for these things if the browser tab was active which meant those 100 WILDLABS tab users among you are no longer tiring out the CPU!)
• We've moved our caching system (not making a database query twice if the data hasn't changed basically) to the Redis in memory database system (this had a big impact)
• We've put even more things into that cache so they aren't re-loaded unnecessarily
• We've moved our servers (this week, hence the scheduled maintenance) to some new infrastructure which allowed us to speed things up even further by allocating more memory.

If there's anything in particular that seems slow for you (especially if it's regularly slow), please let the WILDLABS Team know so we can know where to focus on making the next set of performance improvements.

Notifications

Email notifications were something that took a good three total rewrites and a lot of thought to get right. They have been one of the hardest things to work out the best approach and technical structure for but we've got there I hope, and I hope you've liked receiving them (or opted out if you don't want them).

The new activity email notification system works by a user profile setting (you can edit this yourself) of after how many days of inactivity (not visiting the Platform at all) you would like to be notified of what happened while you were away. This comes in the form of:

• Direct messages you've received
• Mentions
• Comments / replies on posts you've made
• Reactions to your content

If none of this happens you don't get an email, you only get an email about the same updates once, and if you visit the Platform yourself you clear any emails from sending. This cuts down the notifications feeling spammy and just lets you know about the direct interactions other members had with your profile since you were last here.

On-Platform notifications (the little bell) remain separate and unchanged.

Other improvements

Here are some of the other bits that we've done across the site since I last posted an update:
 

• Dozens of design and visual usability tweaks, especially on mobile, to make things more usable and readable. A big shout out to front end developer @valeria  who moved on from Octophin this month for all her work on the Platform over the last few years.
• Embeds of external links should be faster and clearer now as we've built our own system off the back of the iframely embed service and cached them the first time they're loaded.
• We've tidied up some of the information collected on events and careers and made certain things required so that it's clearer what something is about and who it is for.
• Introductions / summaries are now compulsory on all content.
• The little hover popups on people's names are in more places across the site (not just mentions) and have more useful, clearer information in them.
• There are some new sort options in the members directory, including sorting a search by members' contributions to the community (also look out for some more tools to count your Platform contributions coming soon).
• We've rebuilt the list of a member's activity that shows up on their / your user profile into a paginated list that shows everything rather than only a handful of recent entries.
• We've rebuilt the sorting and filtering for the "global feed" and "my feed" to more accurately show what is going on on the site and in your groups. The "my feed" list especially should make much more sense now.

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From me and the rest of the Octophin team, I hope you've had a wonderful 2023 on and off the WILDLABS Platform. As challenging as it often is, seeing the activity and collaborations on here every day makes it one of the most rewarding projects to work on.

Looking forward to a whole new set of improvements and features in 2024!

Hi everyone!

Following our launch of The Inventory and the badges system here on WILDLABS we have some amazing new features just around the corner, but we've also been doing lots of bug fixes and minor changes that stack up to hopefully make the platform more useable. 

We've also been dealing with performance issues stemmed from AI bot attacks on the platform on several occasions which isn't the greatest fun but is all part of running a web platform in 2024.

Here, in no particular order are some of the fixes we've implemented over the last few months:

"Collections" to "Bookmark lists" and minor tweaks

• The feature previously known as collections where you could add content on the Platform to personal lists has been renamed to "Bookmark lists". The functionality remaines the same and all your existing collections have been moved to the newly renamed system.
• Fixed a bug where content that you bookmarked (previously added to a collection) didn't light up as bookmarked on the site in some cases.
• The display of individual bookmarks now shows you nicer looking cards with background images and more information

Account management

• Fixed an issue where you would get a different set of login cookies when logging in via the site at www.wildlabs.net which could cause you to appear logged out when on the non www domain. These two domains are now merged.
• Improved the wording around setting a new password so what each box means is clearer
• Made it clearer that you have errors in your user profile when saving it. Previously the errors didn't show if you were in a different tab on the form to where the error took place.

Content creation / management

• When working on a draft article or other piece of content over multiple days, the day you first publish it is now the date shown in the system rather than the date you created the draft.
• Improved the handling of images in articles to better respect alignment and image sizing. Also fixed some issues where images were stretching to odd aspect ratios.
• Mentions of organisations, projects and products on The Inventory, which you can do by typing the # symbol (e.g #WILDLABS) would occasionally pick up the wrong item if two items started with the same words.
• Editing a post and adding mentions now triggers notifications to those mentioned. Mentions on draft content are also handled correctly, triggering notifications when the content is first published.
• Assigned contacts can now remove images uploaded to the gallery on their Inventory products

Link posts

• Link posts now appear in searches, feeds, on group pages and in your content listings and user activity.

Notifications

• Notifications for threads you are subscribed to now show in your notification summary emails (if you have chosen to receive these emails)
• Subscribing to notifications when you have just signed up for the site and never had another notification could send all updates to that thread to you.

Content authorship

• Organisations on The Inventory are now directly associated with posts on the site such as careers and events
• We have assigned legacy (pre 2022) to more actual WILDLABS users and organisations (on the pre 2022 platform only administrators could post content on behalf of people but now many of these people are members of the community). You may notice some new content in the "Your content" section of your profile if you previously wrote content for the pre 2022 version of the Platform.

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Thank you to everyone who reported any of these issues. Looking forward to launching some much bigger things on here soon.

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There are people in this community who need (or know someone who needs) some FREE ABRs to connect to their camera traps! Used for research or for human-wildlife conflict needs! Share with your network!

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Thank you to those who entered the random drawing from this site!