Idea?

I don't understand why it is apparently "preferable" to have a glut of images of all kinds of insects under "ID Request," but it is somehow spoiling the order pages to have images there that have been identified to at least that level. Why is 'that' a problem? I guess I'm just frustrated because I don't have time any more to labor over the "ID Request" pages, and it seems I'm not getting much help from others?

to help. Although spider images are only a fraction of the submitted images here, use your time for insects, and leave the spiders to Jay, Ben, John and Jane, myself, etc. Tagging all the spider images in ID request, moving to the order page, and sifting out from there is not a problem for me. Basically, don't worry about the spider images in ID Request.

Instead of leaving comments on spider images, move an insect image you have IDed to it's proper page, or make a new page if needed; if not submitted by an editor (there is really no reason for editor to make a page for another editor, although I have in the past). I often encounter images that you have IDed, but they still remain in ID Request. Tagging an image and moving to page or frass takes about as much time as leaving a comment.

As long as you and some of the other editors/contributors have been a part of this site, I would think you all would be more concerned with the barrage of low quality images and out of focus images this site has been bombarded with over the past year or so, and especially the past few months. Compare the first years of the guide images to the past year.

We prefer to see images of live specimens.

Please do not even bother to submit images that do not clearly show the specimen or that were taken outside the United States or Canada. Crop your image so the bug fills the frame. If your camera won't focus close, try carefully using a flatbed scanner.

Do these rules apply anymore?

We agree with you in that we also don't like 40 pages of mixed ID Request. What we were hoping for is the ability to put subpages under ID Request just as we now put family under order or genus under family. That way all unknown beetle images would be on the beetle page of ID Request.

What we were trying to say is that we also don't like unidentified images on order pages on suborder pages on family pages on subfamily pages etc. Right now, a visitor, interested in helping us identify our unknown flies in general, has to look in maybe 20 different places to find all the different images of flies that are not yet identified. Some are on the diptera page; some are on suborder pages, some are on family pages. It seems to us to be a mess.

But maybe it's fine. An expert in Stratiomyidae could come in and check the family page and then look at all the genera pages under it and find flies that need ID. Then he or she could move up in the taxonomy to the Diptera page to see if there are any unidentified stratiomyids there. Maybe that's fine -- we don't know.

But that's why we thought it might be helpful to ask some of the experts what they would like. We don't know where John Ascher goes when he stops by to ID hymenoptera. Can he find the images that need ID easily? Or does he have to go searching around rather randomly hoping he will run into some that need help? We don't know.

Maybe, as you suggest, the best place to move unidentified images is to the family pages. But maybe in small groups such as millipedes it is sufficient to move them to the base millipede page. It's the big groups such as flies, where we get confused. Some families seem easy and images can be readily moved to family. Nematocera seems easy and people move images there readily even though they don't know the family. Then there are those 13 pages that people can't seem to even get to first base on. Are those frass? Or are we just waiting for the right expert to come along?

Well we've plodded on for far too long. Don't know how to get an answer to your request. Hope we hear from some of our visiting experts here to tell us what they would like to see done with images in their specialty.

Ok, I wouldn't quibble with subheadings under ID Request. Frankly, I don't know why anything is being put at suborder level for 'any' taxa (except maybe for flies). I know I sometimes stumble upon that crevice by accident and am amazed at how much is in there, like under the Orthoptera! That brings up another problem, in that I can funnel things down, often to family level, from images under the order only, but that is an additional task, and I don't know who is helping other than you kind folk:-)