Hi zooniverse community,
I am working on Akevot’s project in Hebrew (project #10648) and have a few questions that I haven’t been able to find answers to on talks yet.
I have seen some great modifications to workflows and layouts we would like to adopt from current zooniverse projects. The changes we would like to make are as follows:

1. For a single text task, I would like there to be multiple fields that the user must fill in. Just like in the ANZACs project (statement of services workflow) where they have surname, first name and No. in separate fields.
2. Smaller margins to enable a larger document-viewer. Anzacs also has this feature, enabling to utilise more of the screen to display the document.
3. Tick boxes, as in the serengeti project, there are two tick boxes on the bottom to mark “fire” or “no animals present”, disqualifying the subjects.
4. Is there a way (through panoptes and/or more sophisticated markdown) to align text from right to left?

My main question regards what is the best way to implement such changes. Are these maybe trial features that can be activated by zooniverse? Should I contact the specific projects and ask them directly? Are most code modifications available on github? If so, can these changes be achieved through panoptes?
I guess I am still trying to figure out what is the best strategy to adapt the current project builder to our needs. I am not a professional programmer but am comfortable in coding environments and am willing to invest some time in learning pyhton, getting acquainted with panoptes, or any other zooniverse adventure if needed. Any input/tips/links to previous talks will be super appreciated. Thanks!

Hello, netflix5467. There are a number of images in the Snapshot projects where there are no animals present, even if a rough selection have been made before they are published on Zooniverse. If I see an image which seem to lack any animals my method isn't very sophisticated. I take the time to scan the picture, especially at the borders, where a tail or a nose might be all we see, and then I zoom in just to see if anything, large or small, is hiding among the bushes. I can't think of any other way to handle it. One thing though - with time one do get better at seeing animals hidden away - I think we develop an eye for "strange" forms compared to the greenery,

I am building out a camera trap project, and can see in the example choices.csv one way of building in a "Nothing here" choice (no animals in photo) is to include it among the list of choices.

Looking at a couple of already going projects, I see that, for example in the Snapshot Wisconsin project, the "No animals present" choice appears separately below the list of animal choices, which is easier to see and quickly select. I can't figure out how this was done - it seems that just adding it as a new question in the workflow, for me, puts the "Nothing Here" on the next page. Any suggestions on how I can get this to work?

Thanks @Pmason and you're correct!

@NatureUpNorth please direct message me with your project ID and I'll be happy to enable the experimental combo task and discuss how it can be used to the similar effect as Snapshot Wisconsin's "No animals present" choice.

Hello!
I have been developing a project and have made a survey task with all of my animals listed. However, I would like to insert a check box with "No Animals Present" like in Snapshot
Serengeti's last workflow. Could anyone explain to me how I could do that?
Thank you!

This is an experimental feature that zooniverse staff can activate (or not) based on your project needs. Contact them directly at the normal email (contact@zooniverse.org), and give them details of your project, workflow and a brief justification (why you want it) as compared to having simply a "nothing there" or "appears blank" as a choice in the survey.

Note that the logical branching to other tasks can only have one "next task" whether the volunteer completes a survey choice or picks the shortcut "No animals present" option. This is not an issue if the workflow is simple and you do not want to do different things based how the volunteer proceeds through the combined task.

Hi @GWPaz -- I agree with all the pieces of Pmason's excellent comment above:

• That feature is an admin-activated experimental tool.
• Please send an email to contact@zooniverse.org with details about your project (project ID, relevant workflow ID, etc) and a description of what you're trying to do to request the tool be enabled (if necessary).
• I agree that including a "no animals present" as a survey choice would be preferable.

Hi,

(I have already another, different case here in troubleshooting applying Snapshot Serengeti.)
Knowing you are very busy, so sorry to bother you with also this one. And I just ask, could fixing this problem (below) be done by Zooniverse Team?

This problem applies currently all projects on Classify page in Snapshot Safari. I am not sure if fixing this belongs to Safari Team (has not responded), or Zooniverse Team. Not absolute sure also, if this has been from the start of this platform, or has it appeared during these ’Classify updates’. (I suspect it could have appeared through these). Noticed first time just quite recently in one other project in Snapshot Safari.

Problem is in the communication between ID-list and the box ’No animals present’ on Classify page.
Normally (at least in old Ouroboros), if marking ’No animals present’ , it disables automatically possible animal identifications chosen. And vice versa. Now though that does not happen. Meaning that system allows both into same classification, if volunteer does not notice to remove (if chosen) the other manually, before clicking ’Done’.

P.S. It is a known glitch, that there is also an extra, unnecessary ’Nothing here’ in actual ID-list. But about that Safari Team has notified us, that they remove that during next maintenance. So that is not the problem I mean in this post, we use marking ’No animals present’, if there are no animals in image.

In practice is currently though possible to include all, e.g. ’No animals present’, 8 elephants and ’Nothing here’ into same classification. And that is not a good thing, that system allows that.

Thank you for all your kind help

I'm sure you've already thought of this, but some projects have a 2 or 3 option radio button at the start that then leads to either "Done" or a further set of questions, depending on how you answer the first question. So you could have a choice of "nothing here", "fire" or "animals present", and selecting the "animals present" question would show you the usual table of animal species. Galaxy Zoo and Mapping Change are examples of projects that use this kind of process in different ways for very different data.

Of course, this approach adds an extra step, and volunteers might dislike that, especially if a very high proportion of the Subjects do have animals present.

Just had another session on Snapshot Ruaha using Safari. Rattled through a good number of No Animals Present as its button was responsive. Came to some images, impala of course!, and everything fine except Young and Horns. These were ‘rocker switch buttons’, yes or no, which that workflow didn’t script as mandatory. They were very unresponsive. One image showed impala standing and eating. I selected both on the behaviour choices but when I got Young-Yes to respond the selection of eating dropped off. All decidedly flakey.
I will have another try with a newer Snapshot workflow where one of the Young buttons does have to be selected to proceed and see if being mandatory makes a difference.
I haven’t got Chrome installed
Thanks for your concern