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, iOS, Website): Website on PC
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.):
Step 1: I filter for a species and location, say American Bittersweet for NY State.
Step 2: I zoom into the map and click on an observation and enter a comment or ID in the observation page.
Step 3: When I hit the back button to go back to where I was on the map, it automatically zooms out to the whole world and I have to zoom in again. Sometimes the map is blank with not squares.
i think this is normal behavior, and the page is working as designed.
based on your description, i’m not entirely sure if we’re thinking about the same thing, but it sounds to me a lot like something that was noted previously (but which i don’t think ever made it into a bug report):
As @pisum suggested, this is the intended behavior. Moving the map does not change the URL of the page, nor does it change the browser history. If you navigate away from a page with a map and go back to it, it should appear the same as if you had performed the search for the first time, or if you had reloaded the page. I recommend opening observations in a new tab if you want to preserve a custom map zoom not reflected in your search parameters. You’re welcome to open a feature request, or perhaps add your thoughts to the existing post about Explore page redesign requests.