No criticism of anybody, as I know a lot of people have worked hard and are continuing to work hard on this new portal, but I feel we MUST do something to sort out the "branches" on which people post photos.
Drongoes (Dicrurinae) are regarded as part of Corvidae, but that does not really make them "crows", which refers to the family Corvinae, under the Sibley and Monroe classification.
This is not the most serious problem though - Stonechats, Wagtails, Mesias and Scimitar Babblers are NOT 'tits', for example, under any classification.
I'm very happy to advise further on resolving this.
Mike Turnbull Author: fforrest Time: 21/10/2006 22:53 Subject: Forums Arrangement of HK Birds
Dear Mike,
Sorry for the late response to your earlier queries as I am fully engaged by different issues after launching the new portal/forums.
For the arrangement of the forums in the Birds of HK section, the forums are created and arranged at the order based on the content of the new book "Birds of HK & SChina" so that members can make reference to the this book (I think all of us will have at least a copy in hand) to post and find the photos. However, if we put each bird group into a single forum, it will have too many single forums appear at the screen and the list of forums will be very long. Therefore, I combined some of them into a single forum and use the most dominate group as the forum name. If you take a look of the forum section below, you'll see how they are being arranged.
However, I know that it may be quite odd & misleading when we just look at the path above the heading of a post, eg. Birds of Hong Kong Author: cgeoff Time: 22/10/2006 05:15
If you are at the level of 'Forum Index' or 'Birds of Hong Kong', by holding the cursor over the group of birds, you can see a full list of species contained in that group. The current arrangement is not ideal, but at least doing this speeds up the process of seeing what is inside each group.
Given the current layout of the Forum, it is difficult to see how to change it without creating unwieldy titles for each section. Species numbers from The Avifauna might be one way, but that presupposes people have some broad idea of what these are. A link to the list could be provided, but that would add time to a search for a particular species, probably more than would occur by holding the cursor over different groups.
However, jacanas being inside the 'rails' group is not this kind of issue. Jacanas are shorebirds.
Geoff Author: fforrest Time: 22/10/2006 06:39 Subject: Forums Arrangement of HK Birds
Hi Geoff,
Thanks a lot.
The "Jacanas" has be relocated to Shorebirds Section.
Maybe most of us don't know the difference between waterbirds and shorebirds. Can you tell us?
Forrest
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