I have detailed this problem before here http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=2926, but got no useful response. However it has now begun to affect other staff here and I think it needs fixing.

The basic issue is that there is a problem with the functioning of the rucksack editor when a taxon is present in a rucksack which has had an additional taxon name added locally (via edit taxon details). It appears that the editor doesn't filter effectively for non-system-supplied data (I think) and so the rucksack displays the taxon twice (although the rucksack only contains a single TLIK for the taxon).

However if a rucksack containing one of the edited taxa is modified and saved, the resulting file will then contain two copies of the TLIK and will never open again.

So we have a choice, either we remove all user-added taxon names, in which case the rucksack tool will always work correctly, but we will have to put up with situations where recorder reports taxon names which are inappropriate, or incorrect, or it reports a latin name where a common name is required, OR we have to accept that the rucksack functionality is severely impaired, but our reporting looks the way we would like it to.

I sincerely hope that the promised changes to the taxon dictionary will solve the problem of needing to add taxon names locally, but somehow I doubt that this will be true in all cases. The ability to add useful common names, where they are not already supplied (such as for genuses, aggregates etc.) is pretty much essential for high quality reporting.

Then again the rucksack is a very useful tool which we cannot use at present because many of our current rucksacks are prone to corruption.

This is now top of my list of priority fixes for the new version of Recorder.