ZooChat is 20 years old!

[dillotest0]

I expect to see more extinctions in the future. I don't think wildlife conservation is in vogue right now as it was twenty years ago - with the general public, I think animal rights' causes and welfare concerns overshadow habitat preservation and the kind of conservation, ex-situ or in-situ, that we discuss here. There is still the very real possibility that zoos will someday be the only place to see for example tigers or rhinoceros, not the wild, even if conservation efforts make these less likely outcomes in some instances.

I do think that with the public there is a difficulty in discerning animal rights for cats, dogs etc and animal conservation for wild animals. And it's because of this that miscommunications are often, and AR groups can act in an incongruous manner.
Though I can never help but find it interesting/amusing how such groups are rather silent on the topic of invasive species...

 

[lintworm]

As much as I'd like to, every day I spend posting statistics is another day longer it will take to get the site upgraded to the new forum software.

You have been talking about the site upgrade for many years now, but do you have any idea when it might actually happen? It feels like a few days extra, in which the forum gets to know a lot of interesting information isn't much in the grand scheme of things.

Alternatively there would probably be enough capable volunteers who could post the statistics for you, if only they got the right rights temporarily.

 

[Simon Hampel]

You have been talking about the site upgrade for many years now, but do you have any idea when it might actually happen?

Nope - I've stopped setting goals for when I'd like to get it done because the reality is that the work required to do so is very complicated and is necessarily a lower priority than the work I do to actually make a living.

To be clear: my main income source for my business is my website PropertyChat, which is practically identical to ZooChat in the software it uses - and getting that site upgraded is my top priority (other than actually generating income to pay the bills). More than 80% of the work I'm doing on PropertyChat will translate directly into the work required to get ZooChat upgraded, so even if I'm not directly working on ZooChat, the ZooChat upgrade is still progressing when I get that work done on PropertyChat.

The challenge is finding time to dedicate to the upgrade work around the work I need to do to generate income to pay the bills.

It feels like a few days extra, in which the forum gets to know a lot of interesting information isn't much in the grand scheme of things.

I tried to give a simple answer to the question about stats - but that doesn't explain the complexity of what's actually involved and just how busy I am with work and my other commitments outside of work. I simply don't have "a few days extra" to spare right now.

Alternatively there would probably be enough capable volunteers who could post the statistics for you, if only they got the right rights temporarily.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple - I did a quick count and there are 228 separate database queries that need to be adjusted and run to generate the stats. Just the overview I usually post on the first page requires 11 separate database queries. The spreadsheet I use to collate the data and generate the charts and tables was so big that it broke Google Sheets and had to be split into five separate files.

It's not a matter of "giving someone the rights" - it's actually a very highly technical exercise due to the enormous volumes of data (1.3 million posts, 600,000 photos!!) to be processed when generating the stats.

One of the things on my wish-list is to automate the generation of most of the stats so we can query them at any time. That's a huge undertaking though - obviously there are far higher priorities for the site, such as getting the gallery cleaned up and restructuring things to make them more usable.