I think I’ve mentioned/emailed this before, but wanted to make sure a bug ticket was logged for it.
When I enter Historical Bird Counts on the Android app, the date and time is always the same, regardless of the date set at the top of the screen. Not sure what determines the date/time, but today’s bird counts were entered as 17th Sep 11:33. Same date/time for the bird counts I did a few days ago.
kia ora @camthelegend, can I ask if you’ve edited the date since, as I have just checked the date shown on your bird count and it shows as the 27th September. Do you have screen shots? I’ll send this to the help desk so we can sort it for you.
Hi Lenore
I sent screenshots through to the helpdesk in July, but have recreated a fake bird count this morning as follows. It’s obviously a live database so this entry will be deleted in a few weeks so i don’t leave garbage data in there.
This is saved to the database with the same dates I previously reported 17-Sep-2022 11:33
Also, zero bird counts are coming through as blank instead of a 0 count. Eg if I want to enter a count that says I didn’t see any birds, I just save it with the zeros, but when I look at the record on the website, it doesn’t list the species that were counted as zero. It’s just an empty bird count as shown below. Perhaps the ‘View’ screen could show the counts without having to go to the ‘edit’ screen to view the counts.
Continuing on from the above issue, the app should differentiate between blank and zero, but currently all birds count records are defaulted as zero. This might be ok for some situations, but sometimes there are hundreds of birds and I don’t wish to count them all as I’m only interested in specific species on that day. However, the app will say there were zero of the birds I didn’t count rather than blank/unknown. Perhaps some people would prefer a setting to choose a default of zero or blank.
In Summary
- Default all records/species to blank (or zero based on setting)
- Pressing the button changes it from blank to 0 and then 1.
- Blank counts could be removed before saving to the database as they weren’t counted
Another option is to have a button to clear the count so it removes the zero.
I’ve also mentioned previous that an option to type a large bird count would be helpful. Like the day I wanted to enter 900 black swans. That’s a lot of button pressing!
Cheers
Cam
That is weird I can see the issue. That certainly doesn’t help when you’d need to edit all your entries. I see your point it would definitely give you carpal tunnel injury tapping 900 times. The old ticket was regarding environmental conditions as a feature request. Can I ask how long the above issue has been happening?
The last time I sent this through (to support@groundtruthhelp.freshdesk.com) was on 16th July 2022, 15:15 and those records in the screenshot had a date of 8th June, 16:16.
@camthelegend Unfortunately the old ticket didn’t mention this issue, I have asked our reporting dev team member to have a look at it though as this may be happening to others. We will get back to you as soon as I hear something from them.
Copy of ticket below for your reference I usually use the historical bird count option, but I’ve noticed the usual environmental conditions fields are not available.
Can we have the environmental conditions available for historical bird counts and can we also include a tide indicator? When counting sea birds, recording whether the tide is in or out makes a huge difference in areas like the Manukau Harbour where the tide can go out huge distances. Most birds congregate on the shore on in paddocks when the tide is in and that can increase the counts.
I’m using the Android App.