Empty Explore map

[dan_johnson]

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) : chrome

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: go to the inaturalist main page: https://www.inaturalist.org/home

Step 2: push the Explore tab

Step 3: enter “Eulophia graminea” for Species at the top and push Enter

The following map shows up, which shows no observations:

Note the map is for the entire world and without any location dots. This behavior is inconsistent. Sometimes it works correctly and sometimes this behavior happens. It is fairly frequent, maybe occurring about 30% of the time and has been going on seemingly for years. The current browser has been at that page for over 5 minutes, so I don’t think it’s a loading delay. I can’t believe such a bug in a key feature would have gone this long without being fixed. Has it been reported?

[jwidness]

I can’t reproduce with https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=97394&subview=map&taxon_id=427629

I suspect it’s the issue pisum outlined here. Does refreshing fix it? Is this the only taxon you’ve noticed it in?

[dan_johnson]

I can’t reproduce now and don’t have the window to do a refresh, but it happens for various taxa.

[benarmstrong]

This is interesting. Yesterday, I reported a different aspect of the issue, that the map wasn’t zoomed / centered: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observations-map-doesnt-reliably-zoom-to-place-so-markers-can-be-seen/38393

Then @pisum pointed me at this issue which is probably the same one. So I tried the link above, and the first time the map had no markers and showed the whole world. The second time the map was zoomed, but panned to the wrong location, like it executes two steps: first, the zoom (which it completes) and then the pan (which it fails to complete, leaving it in the Atlantic):

Now I don’t know if this is two issues or one: zoom and/or pan not being performed vs. no markers on map.

[benarmstrong]

ok, here it is. different refreshes, map shifted by different amounts …

[benarmstrong]

FYI, as Tony requested on the other thread I started, I have now filed a github issue for this that covers both the empty explore map and the incomplete zoom/pan as they very likely stem from the same root cause.

[tiwane]

OK, so we released a fix for this issue just now, but since quite a few parts of the Explore were touched, it may have introduced some new bugs. We tested it on our staging server, but can’t account for all possible uses. So let us know if anything looks weird in Explore, and if the original bug here has been fixed for you.

[pisum]

i don’t think i see an improvement. i still see all the different cases from before i just reload the same page several times. worse, if i throttle my connection (to slow it down), it seems like the “map not showing observations” is especially noticeable, perhaps more noticeable than it used to be.

map not showing observations:

map shifted to the left:

map not shifted:

[thebeachcomber]

I’m still getting this too
I just searched for genus Clematis and I get a totally blank map

I pressed refresh 5 times at different intervals (wait 5 seconds, wait 30 seconds etc), still no points appear on the map

[benarmstrong]

Unfortunately, as others have reported already, the issue does not appear to be fixed. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=97394&subview=map&taxon_id=427629 exhibits the same behaviour as reported in the issue I filed: initially it is blank and not zoomed/centered, and then refreshing the page sometimes loads the map with observations present, but zoomed and centered incorrectly, and sometimes zoomed and centered correctly, just as before.

[tiwane]

Thanks, I can replicate that. We’ll take another look.

[pleary]

We released a potential fix for this late last week. If folks that were experiencing this could try again and let us know if anything has improved, that would be much appreciated.

[jwidness]

Hm, I did a search for Sciurus niger and it correctly panned to the US, but then I changed to S. vulgaris and it stayed on the US.

[pleary]

ok, thanks - I’ll look into multiple searches. In the mean time, if anyone experiences the problems on the initial page load, or observations grids or pins not appearing, please let me know

[pleary]

I looked into this and it appears this was an intentional UX decision we made. I believe the idea is to prevent too much undesired map movement. We do move the map if you search for a different place, but not when you modify or remove other filters.

Consider a case where you’ve moved and zoomed the map to an area you want to explore, and you modify the search filters slightly to see how that affects observation in the map viewport. If we were to zoom the map way out any time you changed or removed a filter, that might not be desirable, though that depends on personal preference and your use case.

Either way, this is an old and seemingly intentional UX choice unrelated to the bug report here. I’d suggest opening a separate request for modifying the map movement behavior on search changes, as this is unrelated to the reported bug of missing observation tiles and the map not focusing on observations on the initial page load.