Issue/question 1: Recently I noticed a change where anytime I click on Explore, it defaults to my home state (Florida) rather than defaulting to “World” as it always had in the past. I never changed any settings that I am aware of. This appears to be a system change that I was not aware of, and don’t like. Can I change back to explore defaulting to world?
Issue/question 2: This morning (from Florida) I tried to search Turkey. A (new?) pop up came up when I clicked on “location”. When I typed in “Turkey”, only four options came up, and the first one simple read “Turkey” (other three were in the US). When I clicked on it, I was given "Türkiye Kazakistan Dostluk Parkı " and found no way to search the country of Turkey. I noticed that at the bottom of the pop up were the words “Powered by Google” which I do not remember ever seeing before. I know this is probably a bug topic issue, but I am more concerned with the changes iNat appears to be making, and how much I do not like them, if they actually are what they appear to be.
I would love to be able to default my explore to my home state or wherever IF I CHOOSE TO, but I do not like it being forced on me, without having been told how to change it if I even can.
If “Powered by Google” is new, then someone better explain why I can’t search Turkey, and/or how I go about getting it to work.
This sounds like your account settings got changed.
If you don’t want to use the “Powered by Google” places use the iNat place filter.
The Explore interface location box does sometimes return odd results and I think it is indeed a Google search, and thus beyond iNat’s control. I was able to verify that searching for Turkey in that box behaves as you indicated. However, searching for Turkey in iNat search bar in the upper left will return an iNat defined place and return observations from Turkey. Regarding the Explore window defaulting to Florida, I don’t know.
Okay, yes my location default was set at Florida under my settings, but I never asked for that or made any changes myself. ??? I now changed that to having nothing in that box. I tried World, but it didn’t seem to offer that as option. It did not appear to fix the “Turkey” problem, however it did give me more options in the country, but no option for the country itself. I guess that makes this portion of my original post a Bug Issue.
I see I am not the only one. All I know is that I was doing searches in Turkey a lot from mid April through the end of May, and never had this problem. I haven’t searched it in June until today, so apparently this issue developed at least a couple of weeks ago, but not much earlier than that.
Yes, thanks, that does work perfect, and gives an accurate (not a simple rectangle) boundary. However, that now leaves me (and anyone else), having to make two additional and unwanted steps every time I search there. Never had this problem before.
Thanks for getting my “fix” started. Very disconcerting how account changes apear tp occur (on any platform) without the “owner” (being aware of) making the change themselves.
Were you always using Explore? Place search in Identity does work differently, using the iNat defined places rather than Google.
To keep things tidier, I’m going to close this topic.
For issue 1: if anyone can reproduce having their default search place set for them without choosing it, please file a bug report. Without steps to reproduce the problem, there really isn’t any way to investigate a fix, sorry.
For issue 2: please follow up on this existing topic.