Annotations keep hiding themselves

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Platform (Android, iOS, Website): website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Firefox

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

On the web view of an observation, there is now a turnout button next to “Annotations” to show or hide this section. I’m a frequent user of annoations, and keep finding that section hidden. Once I show the section, it should stay visible for all future observations I look at.

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I’m kinda sure it was intentional change to reduce time of loading pages.

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I just had this happen too, and I absolutely hate it! Can someone put it back, please?

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I had noticed this but just now I’m not having the issue.

I think showing them is supposed to be “sticky”, so if it’s not, maybe that’s the issue?

Might be related to this recent bug report?: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/annotation-controls-not-loading-properly/22326

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Yes this sounds like a duplicate of that issue. The annotations panel has for a long time been collapsable, and for a couple days last week there was a bug where the open state was not sticking for users. We thought this was fixed last week and at least some people on the other post seemed to think it was fixed for them.

I can’t replicate this myself right now. Is everyone seeing it? If so, could you please list the steps to reproduce the problem. Is it related to closing the web browser, or switching web browsers? Are you logged in?

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OK I may have found a pattern.

The panel is sticky, but reloading the Identify page and then opening an observation from it resets to a closed panel. This then applies to all observations, even ones opened from other places (such as the dashboard).

However, reloading the Identify page and opening an observation from a different place has the same sticky settings as before.

Yes, I reported that bug, which was kindly fixed within hours. The annotations panel on the observations page now stays where you put it (at least for me on Chrome). Very occasionally the panel will close for no apparent reason but it happens very infrequently (and I can’t reproduce it anyway).

Good catch! I can confirm this behavior and it explains why I was observing intermittent loss of stickiness.