Release notes

New design for the taxons explorer

New

• New taxons explorer design
• Add special layout for Albert Kahn micro-project explorer page
• Full tags integration on observations
• New beta identification page (Restricted access)
• Redesign disease identification page (Restricted access)
• Redesigned “forget password” page
• Redesign sign in/sign up pages
• New “release notes” page
• Redesigned GeoPl@ntNet page

Improvements

• Hide observations or queries independently on a tracking project map
• Display “no data” when a species phenology graph is empty
• Show map/phenology active filters on a species page
• Update the observations count on the species distribution map when the timeline is enable
• Use a single select to sort the images of a species gallery (combine sort by and sort order)
• Add common name in observation determinations
• New project cards design on the homepage
• Update homepage design
• The quick identification widget from the homepage now leads directly to the identification page
• Change users list layout to properly handle very large list of users

Bugfixes

• Better handle null values inside observation additional data
• Wait until group area is defined to load the map when it has a restricted area
• Correct species map graph controls layout issue on mobile
• On species x tag galleries clicking on an image would open another one
• Display gravatar avatar for users who have one
• Notifications feedback in the header was flashing when the notifications were reloaded
• Don't reset species distribution timeline step when selecting another organ

Improved right-to-left languages support

Bugfix

• The website layout is reversed when a right-to-left reading language is selected (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu)

Add Australian language

Improvement

• New english autralian language supported

Bugfix

• URLs that did not exist were being indexed by Google (e.g., URLs of a user's page ending with an hyphen) because it was crawling the content of a <script type="application/json"> tag that contained strings resembling paths. These strings are now generated in a different way so that they no longer resemble paths and Google stops indexing irrelevant content.

Minor corrections

Bugfixes

• On the groups page, when the user performed a search and/or changed the sorting, then returned to the previous page, the search field and the sorting selector did not retain their previous values.
• Same issue on the plots page
• Fixed a layout bug on Safari with the "it's the right species" and "Compare pictures" buttons in the identification results
• The "copyright" license image of an observation's images is now displayed correctly again

Batch import related bugs fixed

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented the loading of a user's groups on the batch import page
• The mechanism for merging multiple images imported in batch into a single observation no longer triggers if the image has an associated sample_no in the CSV or Excel file. This allows importing images with close dates but not associated with the same observation.

Minor improvements on groups following the latest release

Improvements

• When a user clicks on a notification indicating that a user has requested to join a group they administer, the members' sidebar automatically opens when they arrive on the group page.
• When a user clicks on a notification indicating that a new message has been posted in a group they are a member of, the messages' sidebar automatically opens when they arrive on the group page.
• Added a counter with the number of invitations to validate at the end of the label of the button to open the members' sidebar.

Bugfixes

• In some cases, loading a group's observations did not work when the user navigated to that group from a notification.
• The loading "feedback" on the map of a species page is now hidden when the data loading request returns an error.

Major update, new feature, redesign pages…

This releases was mainly focused on redesigning the observation and group pages. Also the new redesigned species page that was in beta since a couple of months is now the default one.

Observations

New

• New design of the observation feed page
• New design of the observation page
• Added a button to notify users of an observation in the comments of an observation

Refactor

• Centralized state management of observations

Groups

New

• New design of the group exploration page
• New design of the group creation and edition page
• New design of the group page
• New design of the group in its "reduced" layout (displayed in a list) throughout the site
• New design of the modal for selecting observations to add to a group (also available for adding observations to a plot)
• Group observations can be filtered by member

Improvement

• It is now possible to include or exclude in the export of a group's observations those that are outside the restricted geographical area

Monitoring projects (Restricted access)

New

• New design of the monitoring projects exploration page
• New design of a monitoring project page
• Added a range selector to filter a monitoring project's observations by dates

Species page

New

• The new species page is now the default, the old one is no longer accessible

Plots

Improvement

• Added a map to display all geolocated plots on the plot exploration page

Bugfix

• The button to clear the field for adding a species to a plot was not visible; it now displays correctly.

User account

New

• New design of the user account page

My data

Improvements

• Users can now filter their observations by "GRIN" uses and by IUCN statuses
• The filter sidebar now adapts better on mobile, it is hidden by default and a button allows it to be displayed on demand.
• In the user statistics modal, contribution statistics are now displayed as a "bar chart" instead of a "pie chart"
• More user statistics

Batch import (Restricted access)

Improvement

• Batch import of "image tags" and "observation tags"

Others

Improvements

• English is now set as the default language if a translation is not available in the user's language. Previously, there was no default language, and the translation key was displayed. Most of the time, the key and the translation are identical, so the problem was not visible, but for translations containing interpolations (e.g., {x} observations displayed), the variables were not interpolated.
• Improved UX of modals on mobile
• Improved design of attribution info on maps (copyright)
• Improved design of "admin" info banners
• Special version of the project stats pages to display them in the mobile app
• New sort and order selector for observation lists (of a user, a partner, a group...). Instead of having 2 "select" elements, there is now only one that combines the 2 sorting and ordering options.
• New layout for observation filters, sorting is accessible with one click at the top of the observation lists, and filters are accessible by clicking the "filters" button, which displays them in a sidebar.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug following a redirection after logout
• Use a unique key for each call to useAsyncData (in preparation for the transition to Nuxt 4)
• Fixed the color of the "spinner" on several buttons

Refactor

• Use of composables to access route parameters throughout the app

Minor correction

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that caused an error to be displayed when visiting the species page of a "private" project

Recaptcha V2 fallback

Bugfix

• Integration of reCAPTCHA V2 as an alternative when the reCAPTCHA V3 test fails

Integrate EPPO link on species page

Improvement

• On a species page in the "External Resources" section, a link to EPPO is displayed when available for that species

Bugfix

• Opening a species page in a new tab from a plot or an observation no longer causes an error when loading the page (species not found)

Improved support of species common names in regional languages

Improvement

• On the new species page, the secondary common name is displayed for regional languages (en-AU, de-AT...) if there is no common name for that regional language.

Bugfixes

• The option to identify by URL was no longer available on the identification page; it has been restored.
• For very large groups, loading observations on the group's map would crash and display an error page. The loading will still crash but now silently.
• "Toast" messages displayed at the bottom right of the screen were not displaying correctly after a library update; this has been fixed.
• On iOS, it was not possible to identify multiple images taken with the camera because they had the same name. Duplicate image detection is now based on weight in addition to the name.

Minor correction

Bugfix

• Fixed an error when opening an observation from notifications while already on the observation page

Significant perf improvements

Improvements

• Updated vue-router to the latest version which includes a patch significantly improving Nuxt server performance (https://github.com/vuejs/router/issues/2132)
• Stopped using the @nuxt/images library which was responsible for transforming some site images into multiple sizes and lighter formats (webp, avif). The images were being re-generated each time because the library has no caching mechanism, which consumed server resources for minimal gain.
• Modified the import mechanism of a rather heavy library so that the library is only loaded on the pages where it is used and no longer globally
• Added a max-age cache header on the site's static images (logos…)

Fix some regressions

Improvement

• The use of boolean values in CSV and Excel files for batch import is more flexible; case is no longer considered, and TRUE, true, or True are all accepted (previously only true was accepted).

Bugfixes

• Date filters for observations on the "my data" page were not working
• Promoting a user in a group to admin was not working
• Revoking the admin role of a group admin was not working
• Various minor fixes reported by the monitoring service (BugSnag)

Better signin UX

Improvements

• When creating an account, always display an error message if the creation fails
• When the user clicks the button to create their account, display a loading "feedback" and disable the button until the server responds.

Minor corrections

Bufixes

• Plusieurs corrections mineures remontées par le service de monitoring d'erreur
• Le bouton pour l'affichage en plein écran de la carte des statistiques sur mobile n'est plus affiché car au mieux il ne faisait rien (Android) au pire il faisait buggué la page (iOS)

Integrate a performance and error monitoring system

Following the integration of a performance monitoring system we made a couple of changes to improves page loading time throughout the site.

New

• Integration of an error and performance monitoring system (BugSnag)

Improvements

• Loading the donation message and other messages no longer occurs on the server when the page loads. It now happens on the client side, aiming to reduce server page generation time.
• Loading notifications no longer occurs on the server when the page loads. It now happens on the client side, aiming to reduce server page generation time. This will only impact already logged-in users.
• Notifications loading is now paginated.
• The groups and plots of the logged-in user are no longer automatically downloaded on the client side when the page loads. This should optimize the loading of pages that do not need the user's groups or plots (species page, identification page, etc.).
• On a species page, loading the top users of the species' family and genus only occurs if the user opens the modal displaying this data. Therefore, the species page should load faster.
• The galleries on a species page are now "paginated" on the server side. For species with many illustrations, this will prevent downloading sometimes 15 MB of JSON.
• In addition to pagination, galleries can be sorted according to several criteria.
• Reduced loading time of group pages.
• During batch import, if an image already exists in Pl@ntNet, there is now a red border around the image in question, and its name is mentioned in the observation error message.

Refactor

• Simplification of the management of different states related to groups and plots

Various improvements and corrections

Improvements

• Images displayed in "slideshow" mode are now correctly positioned regardless of window size, and navigation arrows are always visible (issue on mobile)
• It is now possible to collapse the list of users in a group (important on mobile when there are many users, because the observations are under the users list)
• Labels on bar charts on mobile were often unreadable due to overlapping; on a case-by-case basis, they are either no longer displayed or displayed while avoiding overlaps as much as possible
• On phenology charts, brown ("flower") has been replaced by pink

Bufixes

• On iPhone X and above, the "superview" (space at the top and bottom of the screen) is now taken into account, and the link to the observation of an image in the slideshow is accessible
• The layout of a group's additional information was not displaying correctly on mobile
• On the family explorer page, the singular form of the genus was not used (previously 1 genres, now 1 genre)
• On mobile, using the sidebar menu on the species page caused the header to disappear
• On the "my data" page, changing tabs did not scroll completely to the top of the page
• When editing a plot, locally saved data was not updated correctly

New plots data on stats page

New

• Plot statistical data on the global stats page: https://identify.plantnet.org/stats

New plots UX

New

• New interface for plots (multi-image identification) (Restricted access)
• Interface for disease identification (Restricted access)
• Display of an alert when identifying certain plants (DEAL Réunion alert)
• Shortcut in the header to create a group, an observation, or a plot

Bugfixes

• The "select all" checkbox for batch import now works correctly again
• The switch in the species table of a monitoring project now works correctly again
• The date selection widget on an observation in the batch import now displays above the next observation line
• The label of the CSV file selection input in the batch import interface no longer overflows its column when the browser window is resized
• The privacy "switches" of an observation (map and personal note) now display correctly again
• Keyboard navigation in the images of an observation in the batch import no longer changes the previously selected organ of an image

Small improvements on new species page

Improvements

• The "admin gallery" tab on the species page no longer appears when the gallery contains no images
• When changing tabs on the species page, the scroll automatically returns to the top of the content of the newly selected tab

Bugfix

• Fixed a bug displaying the IUCN alert above a species map

Various improvements

Improvements

• On the old species page, the year selector for phenology should no longer be empty
• On the species explorer, the values of the GRIN and IUCN filters are now displayed in the user's language
• When a static page (terms of use, etc.) is not translated into the user's language, the English version is now displayed instead of an error message.

Batch import with excel file

Improvements

• Batch import now supports importing data from a .xlsx file in addition to the csv file
• In batch import, when importing the csv or xlsx file fails, an error is now displayed with the description of the error in question
• Improved readability of graphs on the statistics page

Bugfix

• Fixed a redirection issue that prevented the mobile app from displaying the stats page in English

New design of the species page

New

• New species page (beta)

Improvement

• Improved design of tag-related pages (new gallery design, categorization by category/sub-category, label updates…)

Bugfixes

• Scrolling within a modal did not work when the mouse was not over the modal itself but over the semi-opaque black background behind it.
• Fixed a bug on Safari with the LD+JSON meta data of a species page
• The "zoom" button (species page, galleries, etc.) no longer allowed selecting the "big" value once the "small" value was selected
• The URL of the "alternate" meta tags to list the alternative URLs of a page in all languages are now in absolute format (necessary for proper indexing by Google)

Better error management

New

• Handling the display of a specific error message when the API is unresponsive

Improvement

• Error handling (404) has been improved on species and observation pages

Bugfix

• Updating an observation without geolocation caused an undefined variable access error

Remove some sort options

• It is no longer possible to sort observations by species and family on the partner page and in the modals for adding observations to a plot and a group. These two sorting options were degrading the performance of the query used to retrieve observations (for users with a large number of observations) and their utility was limited, so we decided to remove them.

Improved species common names UX

Improvement

• Improved interface for editing/reading the common names of a species

Bugfix

• The identified/unidentified filter on the observations page is functional again

Migration to Nuxt 3

The migration from Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3 that runs on test server for a couple of months has been deployed in production.