Explore Species filtering for a taxon you’ve never observed results in never-ending processing by app

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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.

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under About in the side menu): 0.45.0 (114)

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: tap the compass icon at the upper left of the user’s home screen (below the username)

Step 2: tap the binoculars icon on the bottom right of the explore screen and choose “species” and tap “explore species” at the bottom

Step 3: click the green filter icon on the upper right

Step 4: if you choose a taxon you have never observed (we choose Stag Beetles family and genus, as well as Parrots) and tap “apply filters,” the app never stops processing the request (green circle spinning for minutes before we exited the screen), which is what the screenshots depict.

The app still works—you can click out of the screen—but one might expect some sort of resolution or message indicating that “You have 0 species observations of the selected taxon.”

Whereas if you “explore observations” instead of “species” and choose a taxon you’ve never observed, the app returns a map with no data points, which is behavior one might expect and is a resolution to the request

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This happened to me too, before I realized that the two “explore” icons (identical icons, on the same screen) went to different places. It might help to make it more obvious when the app is exploring your own content versus iNat in general. Maybe by including the username or profile icon somewhere prominent on the explore page when displaying the user’s observations.

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You can also use the filter section and there is a spot to filter out posts from a specific profile

Thanks for reporting the endless loading wheel. We’ll have a fix for this in the next release: https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistReactNative/pull/2056

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