About IdentifyThese
IdentifyThese is a free reference for eight things people find and want named — rocks, snakes, spiders, plant problems, mould, mushrooms, trees and fish. It is published by Allegro Digital, alongside a companion app for each subject.
Why one site
These look like eight subjects and are really one question asked eight ways. Somebody has found a thing and wants to know what it is, usually with some urgency and often with some worry. The method that answers it is the same every time: ask about characters that do not vary, ignore the ones that do, and be explicit about where the answer stops being trustworthy.
How the content is made
Entries are written to be usable rather than complete. Where a choice exists between a technically precise description and one a non-specialist can act on, the site chooses the second and says so. The identification tools work from properties you can observe or test — arrangement, texture, hardness, location, behaviour — because colour, the character people reach for first, is the one that varies most.
Guides show the date they were last reviewed rather than the date they were written, because a comparison that is still true should not look stale. Articles show their publication date, because for those the date is part of the meaning.
What this site will not do
- Tell you a wild mushroom is safe to eat, or that a snake is safe to approach. Those answers need a person looking at the actual specimen.
- Use photographs it does not hold the rights to. The only photographs of specimens anywhere on the site are the apps’ own App Store screenshots. Illustrations of anatomy and method are drawn, not generated, so that what they show is checkable.
- Publish machine-translated content. Other languages, if they come, get material written for that region — most of what is covered here is region-specific.
- Overstate risk to make a page more compelling, or understate it to make one more reassuring.
Corrections
If something here is wrong it should be fixed rather than defended. Every guide and article carries the date it was last reviewed, and a substantive correction updates that date rather than being made silently.
