Today, I get into iNat and see a slight increase in messages. It was an identifier who had flip-flopped 23 times on a plant identity, switching between its genus level and its species name. It is probably within that hour as iNat does not display mins differences. I do flip flop sometimes, but never reaching 10 times. How to deal with such situation ? I’ve tried to use the search functions but I did not see anything of note. Maybe there is another word for this. It is a minor problem actually, I should just let it pass unless it becomes more common. I’ve never encountered this.
While it never happened to me in Inat to that extent, I have had situations where I THOUGHT the system had “frozen” or was lagging and tried to save/post whichever thing I was trying to do multiple times, sometimes trying to switch my input to see if that worked, only to realise later that it did post it… each time.
The only reason it doesn’t happen to me on Inat nowadays is that I learned to refresh the page instead of spamming inputs, but I can easily see myself doing that in accident and never finding out when I was younger. Inat does tend to “freeze” on the “processing” step of inputs for me if I don’t refresh the page after waking up the computer from its overnight slumber.
If you find that it was not an error and the user continues doing that in other observations, you could contact a curator to take action about it.
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As long as it is a one-time thing, I’d just ignore them. Maybe they were having internet issues? I sometimes hit “agree”, have nothing happen, click again, realize the screen has locked, and then suddenly up pops my string of agree/withdraw/agree.
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I see this happen quite often with new observers, who for some reason keep clicking agree on different levels. I assume it’s an accident, and I don’t believe it’s a bug.
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I frequently see two, or three repeats of an ID.
Since the twice happens to me - without me deliberately choosing to click twice - I would count it as a bug. Across iNat obs it would add up to ‘data’ stored uneccessarily.
If you comment on WP, and a glitch repeats your comment, WP politely says - It looks like you have already said that
Because I like to keep my iNat footprint tidy, I delete my duplicated IDs. But for newbies the option to delete an unwanted ID is not obvious.
23 times sounds like VERY glitchy internet. If you look at IDs for that person, are there more obs with multiple IDs? Is it someone new from CNC? Are they still active on iNat (send a message) or long since gone?
But ultimately between busy busy iNat and glitchy internet it is amazing that the system held up!
In just one day, 1 million observations were uploaded to iNaturalist
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The person has 314 observations for the past 6 months. He didn’t identify all his observations. Other people identify those for him. His identification count is 0 , which is strange, because it should be 1. That observation in which he flip-flopped, that would have been 1.
The delete button is not very obvious. It took me a few days to find out where it is.
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Was he identifying his own observation? I think the identification total is only for identifications of other people’s obs.
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No he doesn’t identify his own observations. I see that he has 1 identification at the genus level, However, his stats for Identifications is 0.
Is the ‘should be 1’ the glitchy obs with 23 IDs?
Maybe that obs is itself the problem?
I suspect it’s a bug or user error. I’d recommend writing a comment and asking them about it.
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Living in a rural area with glitchy power and internet issues, I have had an observation repeated multiple times. It was when my computer thought I had an internet signal but really did not. My screen appeared to freeze for an extended period so I blithely clicked the share button a few /many times. When the internet reappeared, it seemed that all my clicks had been held in queue and were dutifully submitted. I felt it was more a local internet/pc issue instead of an iNat bug.
That’s a different situation, though. The OP described switching back and forth – species, then genus, then species again, then genus again, and so on. I always assumed it was indecision – someone who couldn’t make up their mind whether the observation was identifiable to species or not.
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No, as I have said on previous occasions when you have commented on it, this sort of behavior is more likely someone who received multiple IDs on an observation (one to genus, one to species) and is successively clicking agree on each one, possibly without intending to (fat fingers on a phone), or because they are a new user who doesn’t understand what the buttons do. I’ve seen this often enough, almost invariably with app users.
If someone is really indecisive it seems unlikely that they will enter multiple IDs within seconds of each other – indecision involves a certain amount of reflection, which does not happen immediately (you choose something, and then you start to doubt yourself, or you do some research, and then you come back to the observation minute or hours or days later). Often when the observer changes their ID because they are uncertain, this will be accompanied by a comment of some kind.
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By the time I come along, there is no indication whether it was within seconds. Five or six iterations within an hour or on a given date is ambiguous as to how rapidly they switched back and forth.
You can see the date and time an ID was added by hovering over the timestamp. In many cases the IDs that are added in such “flip-flopping” follow a pattern (e.g. reverse order of the IDs they received, then back again from the top as they either scroll through the observation or try to figure out why IDs keep being added and get the one they want).
I see no reason to think that there is any particular intent behind such serial IDs, much less indecision, given that this almost invariably occurs with relatively new app users (on the website display, observations added using one of the apps are indicated on the right-hand sidebar under the observation copyright information).
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oh I didn’t know hovering over it gives a more accurate time. I check again, it is 24 entries over 4 seconds. I counted the intervals, initially I said 23 times.
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that sounds a lot like a browser problem more than anything else
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