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Should we not create common species galleries for the various geographic regions. Obviously there is image material for Europe now.

As the gallery expands here, it will be more and more difficult for a newcomer to find the identity of a common fly.

This library should contain cc. hundred common and easily found fly species. Newcomers could browse their images against this library.

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I think rather the FAQ could be developed to contain diptera information, not just site information.

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If you want to make the site more useful to beginners and non-dipterists, 100 photos isn't going to help with species determination, but it might help with family. But for this better would be a set of good habitus drawings, with some size statement, chloropids for instance are usually smaller than syrphids, this should be paired with wing venation diagrams. This would give a rank amateur with a little intelligence a chance to get to family. There should be a link to the image gallery coming up with one typical, perhaps the most common family representative, with below it two links, one to the ten or so most common species for this family, and one for all the available photos of this family.

Also on the habitus page should be number of species, with a link to regional and perhaps country breakdowns, so you amateur can see that in Europe there are 1659 species of cecidomyids and 27 photos in the gallery, so they would know, ah hem not much chnace here.

Also you could have a link from each photo giving a country distribution and habitat break down, plus seasonal data.

Now all you need is 500K of EU money to pay some people to do all the work, you'd be better off singing discordant music or writing illitterate poetry.
B)

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Main objection: How can you tell on forehand whether the pictured species is a common species? ;)
Creating a FAQ-like system will take a lot of time...

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Maybe it can be made visibly more attractive to search through the images gallery.
On the other hand: most species are too difficult to ID from pictures. One great (in?)direct consequence of this site is that people start collecting insects. And not solely use it to get their picture ID'd. I hope! :p
We (amateur and professional dipterists) all hope that a site like this stimulates the study of arthropods in general and diptera specificly, don't we? :)

I like the idea to do something with regions! This could be made better searchable. For instance, if Paul could create a region-field that MUST be filled in, in order to place new threads. Another obligatory field could be date of capture. Now we must ask too often things like this, because people forget.

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Dank U Andre,

Aye - for the Region field at least. It would facilitate determination.

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About region information. Paul usually removes that info from submitted photos.

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I think a common fly should be understood as a commonly posted fly. The chance that the beginner will take a pic of an extremely rare fly resembling a very common one is very marginal.

There are quite a few species that come up all the time:

Calliphora vicina, Calliphora vomitoria, Lucilia sp, Musca autumnalis, Musca domestica, Phaonia tugiorum, Suillia sp, Minettia longipennis, Scathophaga stercoraria, Eristalis tenax, Sphaerophoria scripta, Helophilus pendulus, etc etc.

The gallery should also contain typical flies without precise identification, like a typical Asilinae, or a typical Chironomid midge etc.

As more and more people will take photos, and the gallery here and at other places will grow, the beginners will have harder and harder time to find what they are looking for.

I am not claiming that this would help species level identifications, but would give the beginners some grip as where to start.

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No, I don't. Picture captions are just names, sex and a sequence number. Regional information should be in the description. The new version of the Content Management System (CMS) should have better search capabilities, including for the Gallery. Then it should be possible to also searcg the descriptions.
Adding a Region field to the Gallery (both for the Submissions AND the Gallery) would require me to do an extensive rewrite of both scripts that I simply do not have the time for. It sounds easier than it is. :( Moreover, I probably would have to do the rewrite all over again with the next version of the CMS.

Another suggestion: A forum thread with commonly posted species or groups. If we make it a sticky one, it will always be on top of the list and everyone can add in a simple way.

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Yes, in the description. If you didn't remove it perhaps there might be a bug in the photo submission script!? For the Bromophila caffra I wrote the location and determination information in the description ... and that was not the first time information was missing from what was submitted.

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Hmm, perhaps the submission field is shorter that what you eventually type in with the result of the info not being saved (like can happen in the shoutbox). I never delete such stuff intentionally.

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I found the reason. Any info in the description field that is entered on a new line is not stored with the submitted image. I will report that as a bug in the CMS forum.

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"A forum thread with commonly posted species or groups. If we make it a sticky one, it will always be on top of the list and everyone can add in a simple way."

I agree totally! Let's go with it! I can help a little in next holidays. ;) In Summer. ;)