I rarely encounter this issue, and I’m not sure entirely what causes it. But here is the behaviour. On browser (Google Chrome), if I go to someone’s profile and click on Identifications (where it shows their ID activity, and gives me the option to hit “agree”, sometimes if I click “agree” on the right side instead of the correct behaviour it takes me to a user’s page named “agree” instead.
See the URL below and the result.
As an update, I believe this is related to browser behaviour where it treats the URL as a “new tab” or “new window” instead of correctly redirecting. I am able to now replicate this 100% of the time by right clicking the “agree” button and opening it in that way. I don’t know why this occurs otherwise, but it may be a Chrome-centric issue in how URLs are handled.
the problem is that the Agree? function is implemented via an anchor / link that references /identifications/agree?observation_id={observation id}&taxon_id={taxon id}. if you simply navigate to that URL, you get the user agree’s identification page. however, the page uses some sort of Javascript framework (Ruby on Rails?) to change the behavior of the anchor when you left-click it. instead taking you to the URL, left-clicking causes the page to send a POST request to the that URL, which the deprecated API will handle by adding an agreeing identification by you to that observation.
but if you middle-click (or right-click and select new window / tab) the anchor, the framework doesn’t change the navigation to a POST, and that’s what you’re noticing.
the issue could be resolved by using an actual button instead of an anchor, which would prevent the navigation by default. but that’s such an old page – and one that probably very few people use – that it’s probably not worth messing with it outside of a larger revamp of the page.
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this problem is similar to another one: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-this-web-page/75527
