'Edit Observations > Delete Selected' does not work as expected

Bug Reports
1

Platform: Website

Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

**URLs: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/sqfp?utf8=✓&q=&search_on=&quality_grade=needs_id&reviewed=&identifications=any&captive=&geoprivacy=&taxon_geoprivacy=&place_id=10574&swlat=&swlng=&nelat=&nelng=&not_in_place=&taxon_name=Tracheophyta&taxon_id=211194&day=&month=&year=&order_by=observations.id&order=desc&rank=&hrank=&lrank=&taxon_ids[]=&d1=&d2=&created_on=&site=&tdate=&list_id=&filters_open=true&view=map&week=

Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Before:

before
before1263×894 176 KB

After:
later
later1259×914 284 KB

Description of problem:

Step 1: go to the Edit Observations page, there Search for some of your observations (e.g. here: at some place, in Needs ID state, for some taxa only), then select some observations (e.g. here: the two first search results)

Step 2: hit the Delete Selected button

Step 3: watch the selected observations disappear from the current screen, while not being deleted (from iNaturalist)

It is either a bug (‘Delete Selected’ obs does not actually delete the selected obs), or a very misleading wording (‘Delete Selected’ being really ‘Hide Selected’)

2

addendum: trying to work around the bug using the API (and it works… tediously), I noticed that:
every deletion operation results in an ‘error 500’ message… after which the obs has been correctly deleted.
Maybe it’s related.

3

i would try this again after we’re no longer dealing with CNC stuff.

what you’re describing could just be a symptom of delayed indexing maybe, where a record has been deleted from the database tables but not yet from the indexes.

1 Like
4

The thing is, it worked perfectly once automated through the API (save for the weird ‘error 500’ messages returned upon… success). Meanwhile the same operation through the website leads nowhere. Weird.

5

i don’t think that particular pages goes through the API. so it’s a different workflow on the back end.

2 Likes