Platform update continued 30 JAN 2025

Hi All,

Major upgrade work continues, there is a lot going on and we are trying to minimise the impact to all users by releasing major structural changes in isolated releases to ensure we don't break too many things at the same time!

To summarise what's going on, we're forced to refactor and consolidate much of NatureMapr's underlying data structure to move from a rigid region based model to a more flexible and scalable collection based architecture.

This week we've touched or impacted the following key areas of the platform:

• Any collection can now make it's own announcement to it's own participants or contributors. E.g. Glossies in the Mist could now make an announcement just to people interested in glossies in the mist. Similarly the NSW BCT Land Libraries program can make an announcement to participating landholders, just like Canberra based contributors are interested in announcements from the Canberra Nature Mappers. As a plant or orchid moderator, you may wish to create an announcement to the orchid community and this is exactly what this new structure will cater for. This structure is now in place, but inclusion in the daily summary email is still ongoing with more work remaining to hook the emails up. This change in design will allow more groups to communicate with and engage with their own members and participants based on the many varied interests and group memberships that people have.
  
  
• Comments have been consolidated from 7 different types of comments into a single more flexible structure and Latest Comments now behaves consistently across any collection displaying the latest comments of any sighting belonging to that collection along with any comments hanging off any announcements also belonging to that collection
  
  
• Autocomplete quick search and taxonomy/species selection platform wide has been sped up by a factor of about 20x. The platform is so much faster and leaner now as a result and we are really proud of this work. We have just removed an approx. 10mb payload from every single page load, so you should notice that NatureMapr of late has become much snappier! Quick search results have temporarily taken a step backwards in terms of their accuracy (get the architecture right = 2 steps forward, then fine tune search results = 1 step back), but we're onto this and the quality of search results will be improved shortly now that the architecture is spot on. E.g. good luck trying to search for "emu" at the moment, but this along with a number of other quirky search results behaviour will be resolved soon.
  
  
• Further improvements to the sensitive data handling framework in consultation with NSW Government Saving Our Species team have been introduced. This will ensure the most highly sensitive records are further safeguarded following some excellent advice and brainstorming with this great team of people doing some awesome work.
  
  
• Thousands of lines of complex routines and bespoke code to support survey functionality have been removed. I cannot believe how huge surveys was and how much effort we put into building that platform. Surveys placed a very large load on our infrastructure and was a nightmare to maintain due to the extremely high complexity of what it needed to do. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes we've made, both commercially and sustainability wise. It is a major relief and reduction in our stress levels to be able to decomission these large and complex parts of the platform. Core survey functionality and hosting remains fully in place through to 30 Jun to ensure existing surveys are extremely well supported and their transition is stress free.
  
  
• Users now have a single, consistent profile (same badges etc) across all NatureMapr regions. This has removed a large amount of complexity and again helped with our maintenance footprint.
  
  
• We previously maintained 2 distinct versions of the platform navigation menus. One for global navigation and one for regional navigation. These have now been merged and consolidated into a single, common navigation structure that is vastly simpler to maintain and reduces the risk of new bugs being introduced. Further simplification and consolidation of navigation elements is planned to provide a consistent experience across all regions and all collections. This aligns more generally with our architecture vision of moving to a flexible collections based architecture and away from a purely region based architecture.
  
  
• Key routines that save audit trail information about sightings and generate user alerts have all been optimised and simplified to be able to operate under much higher load
  
  
• Further caching has been introduced to aid performance.
  
  
• Cyber security attack exposure and overall footprint has been reduced and tightened up
  
  
• Several minor bugs in response to user "contact us" forms have been resolved (thank you to everybody that has submitted a contact us form to let us know about any niggling issues).

If you notice any odd behaviour related to these areas of functionality, please let us know via completing a contact us form or emailing support AT naturemapr.org

Lewis Choy mans our support mailbox, please give him your full support as he is doing a tremendous job supporting me in managing it all.

Thanks for your patience while we work through this.