Donate

Common questions

The headings below are written the way the question is actually asked, so look for your own sentence. Each one names the real cause and what to do about it — nowhere does it say “please try again later”.

Signing in to the app does nothing and says nothing

This is a defect we know about, and it is described here rather than hidden. A wrong password, an account that has not been confirmed yet, and an address that does not exist at all all look the same in the app: the screen stays as it was and no message appears. On the website all three are explained.

Check in this order: whether you opened the confirmation link in the e-mail that arrives after registering, because the first sign-in will not go through without it; whether the password is right; and whether the address is spelled correctly. If you are unsure about the password, change it on the website — see the next question.

The quickest check is to sign in once with the same account on the website. The website will tell you whether it is the password, an unconfirmed account, or an address it does not recognise.

I have forgotten my password

A new password can only be requested on the website. Enter your address and any password: when the password does not match, the website offers to send you a link for a new one. That offer never appears in the app, and the sign-in screen says so: a note under the form explains that the password is changed on the site, in a browser.

The link in the e-mail opens in the app too, so you can set the new password on the phone. After that, sign in to the app with the new password.

The app says I am signed out and I did not touch anything

An account has one sign-in at a time. Signing in with the same account on another phone or on the website ends the earlier one, and signing out anywhere signs you out everywhere. That is why the app can sign itself out although nobody did anything on it.

Sign in again on this phone. Nothing in the send queue is lost, but those items do not go on their own: they move to the failed list with “Your session has expired”, and after signing in they have to be sent with “Send everything again” on the “Queue” tab.

If a shelter shares one phone, give every volunteer their own account. A shared account means one person signing in signs everybody else out.

The photo will not upload

Almost always there is no signal. Everything you enter is written to the phone first and only then sent — until it goes, the item sits in the queue on the “Queue” tab. It leaves on its own when the network comes back, unless you have paused sending.

The queue does not give up: it retries, less and less often, and deletes nothing by itself. While there is a number on the “Queue” tab, the photo is safe on the phone. Pause keeps it there until you resume or tap send now. If the failed-sync bar appears, the reason is printed next to the item itself.

Do not photograph the same animal a second time because the first photo “did not go” — you will get two posts instead of one.

It says the photo is too large

The server does not accept a file larger than ten megabytes, and that is a refusal no amount of retrying can fix. So such an item goes straight to the failed list instead of waiting in the queue.

The app otherwise shrinks every photo before sending, whether it came from the camera or from the gallery. The one case it cannot shrink is a format the phone itself cannot open — an iPhone HEIC on an older Android, for instance — which is then sent as it is. Photograph the animal with the app's own camera and it will go through.

My video will not upload

A video goes through the same queue as a photograph, so the same holds: with no signal it waits, and it carries on by itself where it stopped — it is not sent from the start again. If "Videos only on Wi-Fi" is on, it waits for Wi-Fi. Do not record it again while it is in the queue.

Some refusals cannot be fixed by sending again, so such an item goes to the failed list with one of these messages:

  • "The video is too large to send" or "The video is longer than the server accepts": trim it with the sliders and publish again.
  • "The server did not accept this video": the file is not what the app produces (it carries location data, for example). Record or choose it again from the app.
  • "The server has no room for videos right now": not your doing. Tell the shelter or us, and try again later with a new post.
  • "Sending the video expired": it did not finish within two days. Try again — the video starts from the beginning.
  • "The video is no longer on the phone": the prepared copy was deleted (by a storage clean-up, for example). Record or choose the video again.

I cannot edit this animal

An animal is edited by the volunteer who entered it and by the shelter's administrator. If somebody else entered it there is no edit button — and even if there were, the server would refuse the change. That is a rule, not a fault.

The other possible reason is that you have been moved to the inactive list at that shelter. Deactivation deletes neither your account nor anything you have written; it takes away exactly one thing — the right to edit that shelter's animals. Ask the shelter's administrator to move you back to active in the “Volunteers” pane, or to make the change themselves.

My colleague cannot open the shelter administration

The shelter administration is opened by the account the shelter is registered to, and by anybody on that shelter's roster who is active and holds the manager or administrator role. An ordinary volunteer on the roster does not have it, and that is deliberate: the roster exists to assign work, not administration.

Add them in the “Volunteers” pane with that role. The “invited” state grants nothing and no screen produces it today — a person is added as active and can work immediately.

The e-mail never arrived

First look in the spam folder, then check which address is on the account. Then one thing worth knowing: the site learns nothing about what happens to a message once it has handed it over. A message can be accepted and then bounce, or be filed as spam, and the screen says it was sent either way. “Sent” means handed over, not delivered.

There is no “send again” button for account confirmation. If the confirmation link never arrived, write to kontakt@zooplanet.org and say which address you registered with.

None of this matches

Write to kontakt@zooplanet.org and describe what you were doing immediately before it stuck: which screen you were on, what the animal is called, and roughly when it happened. Those three facts are the difference between an answer the same day and a week of correspondence.