Change in behavior of adding an ID via web

Bug Reports
1

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

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

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

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: any place you can add an identification – both the Identify pages and each observation page

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: type the name of an organism in the identify field

Step 2: click the “View” link to the right of any listed organism in the drop-down list

Step 3: it used to be that this would select that organism for the identify field, and open a new web tab with the taxon page. Recently this changed, and now it clears the identify field and opens a new web tab with the taxon page.

The old behavior was really useful and something I did many times a day, as I would think I knew what taxon I wanted to identify, but don’t trust my memory so would quickly look at the taxon page to verify some aspect of this (usually the range or an obscure field mark) before making my identification. With the new behavior, I have to type the name twice. Was this change intentional, or accidental?

2

Intentional: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/3172

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Was there any public notice or discussion before that change? What problem were they trying to solve?

The old behavior did not enter the taxon as your identification, it just entered into the form; you still had to click “Save” to actually make the ID.

4

There was a forum feature request: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/web-uploader-dont-fill-in-the-taxon-field-when-view-is-clicked/24344

but in github it’s described as a bug, so it seems the dev team thought it wasn’t behaving correctly

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5

interestingly, when you click View on an item in a vision results list (in the upload and observation pages), the list does remain open. but when you click View on an item in an autosuggest results list, the list will either close (in identify and upload screens) or switch to the computer vision results list (in observation page). seems inconsistent and worth addressing.

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