Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.
Platform: Android
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): 1.30.15 (608)
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : n/a
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/165503122 is an example which I marked as Gall at about 09.00 BST today. There were others at around this time today.
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.):
Step 1: Load an observation
Step 2: Annotate as (eg) Gall
Step 3: The annotation was attributed to someone else.
On my browser and my smartphone the annotation is attributed to someone whose profile image is the head of a bird, and the username is not my username. My profile image is a hoverfly.
If you are seeing an insect profile image and my username, then it is a more complicated bug which shows different data to different people.
Buit it was me who made the annotation (cf125), and my profile image is a yellow and black insect. The birdhead image has a different username from mine.
If there is already a “Gall” attribute value on an observation when someone else send a request to add the same “Gall” attribute value, the request fails with HTTP error 400 (“bad request”), else the request succeeds (I have just made both tests, with direct API requests).
My guess is that this other person put the “Gall” attribute value before you (even if it was not displayed on your observation when you attempted to add “Gall”) and that your request failed, then you saw the “Gall” from this other person.
I suggest you to ask the other person to confirm if they actually added “Gall” to your observation. That’s the very first thing to check.
I inspected the data sent by the server when loading your observation, there is no timestamp assotiated to the “Gall” annotation, so I can’t tell you when this other person may have added this annotation.
Yes, today I “annotated in the Android app ( and you are logged in as a hover fly)
and my annotations occur as a bird Puffin”
I “thought” it happened 2 or 3 times before I concentrated on what was happening. Then when I did the elm gall I was certain that there was no annotation at all before I annotated as Gall, and then when I annotated as Gall it came up as a puffin profile image with someone else’s username.
A lot of my observations of leafmines and galls have the puffin profile image and username. I think this may have been going on for months before I noticed what was happening. On my own, I have no way of checking past annotations, but we could ask puffinuser whether he frequently annotates galls and leafmines.
I have just Disagreed with one of my own Gall annotations, then made a new Gall annotation. It worked correctly - no Bug.
I suspect that your explanation is correct. Evidently the Android app sometimes fails to display an existing annotation, or maybe there is a lag in displaying the annotation. Then when I make the annotation (before the existing attribution is displayed) the annotation appears to be attributed to puffinheaduser.
I will look out for this in the future, but I think we can treat it as closed. Thank you for your help.
Are you certain the annotations weren’t done by the other person? See my similar experience here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/annotation-account-oddity/40158
Where someone else was adding annotations at the exact same time as me so some were credited to me and some to them.
Suggestion to notify the user that the annotation could not be added (because it exists already) + force refresh the display to show the existing annotation.
