Template talk:Catalogue of Life

Dead links created by this template.
TaxonIDs on Catalogue of Life all seem to have changed, therefor all pages using this template need to be updated with the new taxonIDs, and the template might need to be updated to accept taxon names as an alternative. Perhaps this should be replaced by my CatalogueofLife species template. Although taxonid is helpful because it allows us to link t the exact taxon page, there is no guarantee that the taxonID format will not change again.

Ex: Chinchilla chinchilla (Lichtenstein, 1829) which had the COL taxonid 6190993 was changed to taxonid 7539827da517bd6273a4a3836578cb24

Old URL (Now a dead link): http://www.catalogueoflife.org/col/details/species/id/6190993

New URL: http://www.catalogueoflife.org/col/details/species/id/7539827da517bd6273a4a3836578cb24 --MCEllis (talk) 17:26, 9 February 2016 (UTC)


 * That is very bad. I wonder whether CoL intends their new ids to be stable? Based on the track record, I'm not confident that stability can be expected. LSIDs should be stable, but I'm not sure how this template could be adapted to use an LSID to get to a taxon record. Plantdrew (talk) 20:35, 9 February 2016 (UTC)


 * CatalogueofLife species is nearly ready to replace this broken template. But pages linked to this broken template must first be fixed before any of this code is replaced. IDs were all changed and therefore old IDs need to be removed from pages. Isn't Catalogue of Life lovely?--MCEllis (talk) 19:57, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Dead/broken links again?
This template seems to produce links only to the 2019 version of the CoL. On top of that, they seem to not work - see the link produced by this example: Is there a way to fix this? I wouldn't begin to know how to fix it myself. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 17:52, 4 April 2023 (UTC)


 * They keep changing the format and last time I attempted to keep it backward compatible by checking the format of the id. Most new ones are alphanumberics of form "4VQ7Y" while the old ones are of form "cacdd06fea1d51b05f753c0b95bb0717". The problem seems to be ids that are decimal numbers (or appear to be) as in this example "64553". I assume this has given a bad link since I made the change a couple of years ago rather than a new change by CoL.
 * I've changed the logic so it now works. There might be a better fix if there is some encoding of the ids that can be checked but I can work it out. Let me know if there are other examples that aren't working. —  Jts1882 &#124; talk 08:53, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * It looks good now and I'll definitely let you know if I run into any more problems. This place would collapse if not for tech editors like yourself :) Thank you so much. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 09:13, 5 April 2023 (UTC)