I’m not sure that i would characterize this as a workaround since i personally don’t see a big here, but:
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Platform: Website
Browser: Microsoft Edge
URL: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?taxon_id=373425&place_id=1&without_term_id=1
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Description of problem:
Step 1: Open Identify tab
Step 2: Set the “Without Annotation” filter to Life Stage = Larva
Step 3: Update Search
Step 4: Check filters and “Larva” has switched to “Any”
I moved your report to this existing one – technically there probably isn’t a bug because it isn’t possible to get observations that either have no life stage annotation or have a life stage annotation other than larva. If there is a bug, it’s that the interface will let you choose those drop-downs, making it seem possible.
As it turns out, the parameter term_id_or_unknown can be combined with without_term_value_id to get observations which either have no value set for a specific annotation, or they have a value but it’s something other than the one specified. For example, term_id_or_unknown=17&without_term_value_id=19 calls for observations which either do not have Alive or Dead filled out (the value is null), or which do have it filled out, but it’s filled with anything other than Dead (so either Alive or Cannot be determined). That is, you can exclude only observations marked Dead, while keeping those that are null, Alive, or Cannot be determined.
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that’s interesting. looks like this functionality was added in early 2024: https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAPI/pull/430/commits. i wonder what specifically prompted this new functionality?
i suppose this would address the specific use case mentioned in the original post, although it’s available only via URL filters, not an interface in the Identify webpage itself, right?
It was added in the context of the Established annotation – it works in both Explore and Identify, and was actually linked from the blog post
I’m not sure how none of us noticed for a year and half 
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oh, interesting. i used to try to periodically scan through all the iNat repos just to see what they were doing, but it became a little more work to figure out what they were trying to when they started storing docs and notes in their team management tools that we don’t have access to.
maybe we need to have a forum topic about what looks interesting in the Github repos so that we can discuss and get more eyes on that stuff… so we don’t miss the importance of small changes like this…
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