Concerning 'Voous' (not) order

Thanks Elizabeth, and thanks also Ian. A few points:

I'm sorry if you feel BUBO is "forcing" you to do anything. We made the decision at the outset of setting up BUBO Listing that we would avoid the temptation of imposing our own preferences in terms of taxonomy, etc, and instead would use published lists. In Britain we use the BOU list. In fact, I've been very slow at updating the order to follow the BOU - it changed a couple of years ago in reality. I also personally found it very difficult to use at first (having been brought up with Wren, Dunnock and Robin as a handy trio in a row, for example). But I recently decided that I was being inconsistent here and we should simply follow the base lists as published, full stop. I'm sorry if you find it awkward, but as Ian points out, most list entry is based on adding a species at a time, so it doesn't really matter what order it's in.

We don't propose to recreate a "proper Voous order". The programming required would take a long time, which we don't have. The Voous order was simply an opinion at one particular point in time, and is no more appropriate than any other. If we were going to create another option, we'd be better simply to allow alphabetical order. But we don't have time to do that either.

In terms of donations, we are of course really appreciative of any donations we receive towards the upkeep of the site - it is really helpful. However, please be aware that collectively they pay for a proportion of the website hosting costs only, anything else comes out of Mike's and my pockets. It's not a huge amount, and that's fine, but please don't get the impression that we are running BUBO Listing as some vast money-making venture. We both have busy professional careers, as well as a multitude of other interests in our spare time. Fortunately, the way we designed BUBO Listing at the outset means that it largely runs itself; this is fortunate because neither of us have the time to work on implementing major changes. Donations would have to increase by several orders of magnitude to let us "give up the day jobs" and work on BUBO properly!

Best wishes

Andy

Thanks William. Yes, not everyone grew up with Voous order, so "user friendly" depends on the user. Only real options for us are either alphabetical order or most recent as produced by that authority.

Elizabeth, if it's any comfort, I still find it a tricky order too, but I'm getting more used to it the more I see it. Indeed, crows as the first passerines was a feature of some pre-Voous orders too.