This is fairly obscure, but it can be a headache and could potentially be an easy fix. Not sure, but I suspect this isn’t a “bug” per se, but a programming oversight. I expect it functions the same on the iOS app…
If a project has observation fields associated with it, when you are using the app, you can add a record to the project and fill out the project observation fields. All good. However, the problem is, if an observation field has a default value, then the default value is automatically assigned as soon as you select the project. The user can change that value, but if they don’t, it’s filled in. How it should work is that each field should be “turned on” manually by the observer, or else the default of every observation field should be null/blank. Otherwise, the situation we are in right now is there are potentially alot of observations with a value in an observation field(s) that wasn’t actually selected by a user.
And sure enough, it auto-populated the “insect life stage” (https://inaturalist.ca/observation_fields/325) field as “unknown” by default. If that field happened to list “adult” first, it would have auto-filled it to that value. In this case, “unknown” isn’t a big deal, but it is still not ideal to fill out a value for a data field automatically, I would say (maybe in some cases that is a good idea?).
FYI - still an issue. Every day I suspect hundreds if not thousands of records have default field values being added to them if they’re part of a project’s list of fields…just go look at the “insect life stage” field with the default value (unknown) and see how many non insects show up:
This is still an issue.
We are getting hundreds of bogus fields filled in on projects that have multiple fields, especially those with multiple fields where only one should be selected. For instance: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/91309447
has six bogus fields added:
1 under the Habitats project where the user added the Habitat, but left the altittude blank, but Altitude was still submitted, and 5 fields under Interactions project where the user correctly added the Passive Partner to: field, but all the other fields were incorrectly assigned.
Unfortunately, project curators cannot delete Observation fields: only their creators can. So the system is being corrupted with thousands of unintended blank fields. e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/7463