Annotations not saving due to invisible values

Bug Reports
1

Platform: Website

Browser, if a website issue: Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/53461553, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59589078

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Screenshot_20250905_105728
Screenshot_20250905_105728763×551 31.8 KB

Description of problem:

Step 1: Try to add life stage annotation

Step 2: Get error dialog “Failed to save record. Please try again later.”

The devtools show the following HTTP response:

{
    "status": "422",
    "errors": [
        {
            "errorCode": "422",
            "message": "{\"error\":[\"Controlled attribute cannot have multiple values\",\"Controlled value has already been taken\"]}",
            "from": "externalAPI"
        }
    ]
}

I seem to remember a previous issue with such errors, but I cannot find the forum topic. Possibly the cause was an out-of-date index somewhere?

2

Bonus bug report/feature request: in the identify tool there’s no feedback for these errors if you go to the next observation before the request returns.

3

Might there have been a placeholder for larva / nymph. Now serving only as a bug.

We have that invisible issue with - Placeholder - caterpillar. Obvs not for these 2 obs.

4

There are a bunch of previous bug reports, but attempting to put the links here inserts a whole chunk of the Bug Report instead of just the link. I don’t know how to stop that.

This seems to be the main report that others link to:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/unable-to-add-annotation-to-a-sighting/57569

Well that’s weird. It puts the link in the post, but displays a whole chunk of it as I’m writing the post.

1 Like
5

That is a Discurs update in recent weeks - displays the unexpected slab of text for the writer - is this the link you meant? But then publishes as it always did. Disconcerting!

1 Like
6

Thank you for the link. Looks like that particular issue was fixed though, perhaps this is something different then?

7

Thanks for documenting this clearly. Oddly, when I added an Alive or Dead annotation, the Life Stage annotation appeared from another user, so now those observations have two annotations (originally, they displayed none).

If anyone sees this again, please add the urls here. You can also try adding another annotation to see if that is an effective workaround.

8

The link that @Vireya posted was partly fixed but not completely. It’s certainly more difficult now for multiple annotations to be added but the underlying issue is still there. [Here](https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/259752807) is a sighting that I played around with to get multiple annotations on. The key issue is that annotation data is still saved even when it’s not relevant to the current community taxon.

I’ll use an example that I think is quite reasonable: someone sees a larviform adult beetle, like a trilobite beetle or something along those lines, and thinks it’s a weird caterpillar. They add an ID of Lepidoptera and a life stage annotation of ‘larva’. Then someone comes along and corrects them, and says actually no this is a cool beetle adult. They add an ID of Coleoptera or something along those lines, and the ID gets pushed back to Pterygota. Now, ‘larva’ is not a possible life stage annotation for Pterygota, so this disappears and the second user can add a new life stage annotation of ‘adult’. But the ‘larva’ annotation is still saved in the system and is not removed despite the fact that it’s not relevant any more. So when the first user comes back, realises their mistake, and either withdraws their original ID or adds an agreeing ID of Coleoptera. The community ID changes to Coleoptera, which can have a life stage annotation of ‘larva’, so that annotation reappears. But the ‘adult’ annotation is already there, so now there are two life stage annotations - ‘larva’ and ‘adult’. This situation could be easily fixed by simply not saving an annotation if it does not apply to the observation any more.

Now to be fair, I am not certain how related this is the above issue but it’s definitely a similar error message so I would imagine they have similar causes.