Better Birder, EO Birders, and MyEO: where things stand

Nothing was actually stuck. I pulled the 26 commits that had landed since this repo was last synced here (the welcome/front-door page, the certified-artwork audit, the beta email signup, legibility fixes), ran the side-by-side against live on every page, and live betterbirder.com was already carrying all of it: someone had already shipped main. I re-ran the full release (preview, side-by-side, live) anyway so the timestamp, the certified-asset audit and the link previews are all freshly verified. betterbirder.com is current. Done

One thing cleaned up along the way: the artwork-certification gate added recently needs Python's numpy and scipy, which weren't installed on this machine. Installed both via Homebrew so deploys here don't break again.

This already exists, built from your own words. On 2026-09-29 a session spun up exactly what you asked for ("spin up my Better Birder profile using the information that I have here") from your real eBird download: life list, countries, big year, year-by-year lifers, where you've birded, your own 737 Macaulay Library photo uploads, your picks (nemesis bird, targets, proudest photo), plus a side-by-side with Chris Sloan's list and a raptor ID comparison deck. Privacy was handled exactly the way you asked: no coordinates, no times, no home addresses, places shown as county or country only.

It has never been merged into the main site: it's sitting on a separate branch (sandbox-0927) with its own preview address, already deployed and noindexed:

sandbox.betterbirder.pages.dev/lab/profile/ (and a head-to-head view at /lab/buddy/)

I didn't merge it into the real site myself: it predates a month of other changes to main (reconciling the two needs real review, not a rubber stamp), and a page built around your personal data and a photo of you is exactly the kind of thing that should get your eyes before it's reachable from the homepage. You also flagged this whole area as "probably Fable stuff" for the visual pass, which fits: the data and the privacy work are done, what's left is making it look like Better Birder and deciding where it lives.

You said to let me know if this needed splitting, and it does. Building the public EO Birders space (member profiles, an events list anchored on real EO dates, a "traveling to a city" board) on top of what's already real here is a genuine multi-hour build, not a bolt-on, especially since the Lab already has a working "bird-ups" mechanic (public / ask-to-join / buddies-only) built for exactly this kind of meetup planning, which the next session should reuse rather than rebuild. Rather than rush a thin version live under your name with the MyEO mark on it, I did the research (below) and left the build for a session with time to do it properly.

The promised MyEO follow-up never arrived. Natasha Kitshoff confirmed the Birders group on 2026-09-30 and said you'd get a separate email with SOPs and marketing best practices once groups finish migrating from ConnectEO to the new OneEO platform. I searched everything from EO since, and that email hasn't come.

I drafted (did not send) a reply to Natasha asking for three things: the SOPs that never arrived, a real timeline for the OneEO move, and EO's rules for putting the MyEO name or logo on a page outside EO's own platforms. It's sitting in Gmail, ready for you to read, edit or send:

Open the draft to Natasha

One limitation: I don't have a way to open your logged-in Chrome from here to look at the actual MyEO group page on ConnectEO, so the fill-out guidance below is built from the emails and ordinary MyEO/EO group conventions, not a direct look at your group's page. If the fields on the page don't match what's below, tell me what you see and I'll adjust it.

• Name: keep it "Birders", already approved, no reason to touch it before the OneEO move.
• Short description: something like “For EO members who bird. Trade trip tips, compare life lists, and plan meetups whenever EO takes you to a new city.”
• First post: introduce yourself, say why you started it (the Better Birder app, your own trips), and ask who's already got a trip or an EO event coming up: Baltimore NERVE (Oct 8-10, happening right now) is a natural one to name first.
• Rules: keep it to birds and EO-trip logistics; no Forum business, no politics; be the kind of group people want to stay in.
• Cover photo: one of your own trip photos (the Oahu or Yellowstone shots already on betterbirder.com/why-birds/ would work without needing anything new).

Real fill-out with the actual field labels on the page waits for either your own five minutes in the group, or a session with Chrome access to you logged in.

EO members already live in WhatsApp for the fast "who's in Lisbon next week" traffic; Better Birder is the better home for profiles, trips and the event list. You create the group yourself on your phone (not something a session can do); here's copy-paste text for it.

Group name:

Description:

First message, once people are in:

• betterbirder.com, live, current
• Your Better Birder profile (sandbox, noindexed)
• You vs. Chris Sloan, side by side (sandbox)
• Draft reply to Natasha Kitshoff (MyEO), not sent